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William Mal<epeace Thacl<eray.

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William Makepeace Thackeray

Modern English Writers

MATTHEW ARNOLD . . . Professor Saintsbury.

R. L. STEVENSON . . . . L. Cope Cornford.

JOHN RUSKIN Mrs. Meynell.

TENNYSON Andrew Lang.

GEORGE ELIOT . . . . A. T. Quiller-Couch.

BROWNING C. H. Herford.

FROUDE John Oliver Hobbes.

HUXLEY Edward Clodd.

THACKERAY Charles Whibley.

DICKENS W. E. Henley.

*^* Other Volumes will be announced in due course.

William Makepeace Thackeray

BY

CHARLES WHIBLEY

^

f|?

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

1903

Copyright, igoj
By Dodd, Mead & Company

Published October, i()o^

CONTENTS

I. BIOGRAPHICAL ----- I
II. THACKERAY IN LONDON. THE TOWN

AND TASTE OF HIS TIME 1 9

III. THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER BARRY

LYNDON - - 42

IV. PUNCH AND CANITY FAIR 74
V. PENDENNIS. THACKERAY AND THE

WORLD OF LETTERS - I16

VI. LECTURES AND LECTURING. ESMOND 1 54

VII. THE NEWCOMES A PARLIAMENTARY

ELECTION - - - 187

VIII. THE VIRGINIANS THE EDITORSHIP OF

THE CORNHILL - - - 212

IX. THE WRITER AND THE MAN - - 234

INDEX - - - - - -251

THACKERAY

CHAPTER I

BIOGRAPHICAL

William Makepeace Thackeray was born at
Calcutta on July i8, 1811. His family, sprung from
yoemen of Yorkshire, was distinguished through-
out the eighteenth century in the learned professions,
as well as in the civil and military services of India.
Thackerays not a few had lived and died in the
making of our Eastern Empire. They had done
those deeds of simple heroism which benefit a peo-
ple, and bring their authors but little fame. They
had built roads, they had administered justice, and
more than one had fallen on the battle-field. Emi-
nent amongst them was Richmond Thackeray, Col-
lector at Alipur, who in 18 10 married Anne Becher,
herself the daughter of a family famous in Bengal.
Five years later the Collector died, leaving a widow
and one son, William Makepeace, just four years old,
who grew up to be the author of Vanity Fair. Like
Clive Newcome, William Makepeace left India a child
of six, and when he pictured the Colonel "tottering
up the steps of the ghaut," he pictured his own ex-
perience. " I wrote this," he confessed, " remem-

2 THACKERAY

bering in long, long distant days such a ghaut, or
river-stair at Calcutta; and a day when down those
steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two
children, whose mothers remained on shore.
We were first cousins ; had been little playmates and
friends from the time of our birth ; and the first
house in London to which I was taken was that of
our aunt." The little playmate was his cousin,
Richmond Shakespear, whose death, deplored in a
Roundabout Paper^ took place two years before his
own. In those days a visit to the enchained Emperor
was a proper incident of travel, and a vision of the
Corsican ogre was one of Thackeray's earliest and
most vivid impressions. " Our ship touched at an
island on the way home," he wrote, "where my
black servant took me a long walk over rocks and
hills until we reached a garden, where we saw a man
walking. 'That's he,' said the black man: 'that is
Bonaparte ! He eats three sheep every day, and all
the little children he can lay hands upon.' "

He arrived in England when " she was in mourn-
ing for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of the
Empire." Nor did he look again upon his native
East. But its influence never left him. If his
childish memory was vague and tear-bedimmed, the
tradition of his family was strong and imperious.
Moreover, the chain which bound him to India was
not snapped by the homeward voyage. His guardian
was his great-uncle, Peter Moore, who at Hadley
Manor lived the life of a country gentleman, and
lavishly spent the fortune he had so easily acquired

BIOGRAPHICAL

in India. An active politician, Moore devoted many
years to the support of the Whig party in the House
of Commons, and, though he should have known
better, joined in the pitiful attacks made upon
Warren Hastings. But speculation was the real
business of his life, and so keenly did he pursue it
that he died at Abbeville an impoverished exile.
His influence was not unimportant, since, as we
may suppose, he quickened Thackeray's early im-
pressions of India, w^hile his career was doubtless
the first romance in being that the boy had con-
templated. At any rate, India is the vague back-
ground of more than one of Thackeray's novels,
and Mr. Jos. Sedley, Colonel Newcome, and even
Boggley Wollah and the Bundelcund Banking Com-
pany, are as near to fact as to fiction.

Like many another Anglo-Indian boy, Thackeray
suffered ill-treatment and neglect at his first school,
which was hard by Miss Pmkerton's at Chiswick,
and which no doubt was kept in the fear of God
by Dr. Swishtail. But in 1821 his mother returned
from India, the wife of Major Carmichael Smyth, the
kindest of stepfathers, and a year later Thackeray
was sent to the Charterhouse. Here he remained six
indolent years, and as the place is woven into the
very web of his novels, this time of idleness was not
wasted. No writer has ever been more loyal to his
school than was Thackeray to the Charterhouse. It
appears as Gray Friars or Slaughter House again and
again ; the best of his characters neglect the educa-
tion that was there provided ; and even his sympathy

THACKERAY

for Richard Steele is the keener, because the Chris-
tian Hero was once a gown boy at the old school.

But if the Charterhouse was a pleasant memory,
the memory had mellowed with time. For Thackeray
was not very happy at school, nor was the system of
Dr. Russell, for a while triumphantly successful,
likely to inspire an intelligent or imaginative boy.
He learnt no Greek, he tells us, and little Latin.
The famous scene in Pendennis, wherein Pendennis
cannot construe the Greek play despite the prompting
of Timmins, is drawn from life, and there can be no
mistaking the Doctor's speech. " Pendennis, sir,"
said he, "your idleness is incorrigible and your
stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to
your school, and to your family, and I have no doubt
will prove so in after-life to your country.
Miserable trifler ! A boy who construes Se: and, in-
stead of de but, at sixteen years of age, is guilty not
merely of folly, and ignorance, and dulness incon-
ceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial
ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate." The
rhodomontade of the Doctor is confirmed by con-
temporaries. Dean Liddell, who " sat next " to
Thackeray at school, has left a sketch of him. " He
never attempted to learn the lesson," says the Dean,
"never exerted himself to grapple with the Horace.
We spent our time mostly in drawing, with such skill
as we could command. His handiwork was very
superior to mine, and his taste for comic scenes at
that time exhibited itself in burlesque representations
of Shakespeare. I remember one — Macbeth as a

BIOGRAPHICAL

butcher brandishing two blood-reeking knives, and
Lady Macbeth as a butcher's wife clapping him on
the shoulder to encourage him." Thus the faculty
of drawing declared itself early, as a few experi-
ments remain to prove. But Dean Liddell repudiates
the charge that he destroyed Thackeray's " oppor-
tunities of self-improvement " by doing his Latin
verses.

For the rest, Thackeray, the schoolboy, appears to
have been " pretty, gentle, and rather timid," as Ven-
ables, the smasher of his nose and his lifelong friend,
describes him. He was never flogged, and only in-
spected the famous flogging-block " as an amateur."
He had a taste for " pastry-cookery," and once con-
sumed a half-a-crown's worth, "including ginger-
beer." He had a still keener taste for reading, not
the Latin and Greek books prescribed by his masters,
but The Heart of Mid- Lothian by the author of //^^t;-
erley, or Life tn London by Pierce Egan. In other
words, Dumbiedikes meant more to him than the
Pious jEneas, and he professed a far deeper sympathy
with Tom and Jerry, not forgetting Bob Logic, than
with Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or Hannibal split-
ting the Alps with vinegar. More than penny-tarts,
more than games, he loved the novels of his boyhood.
" I trouble you to find such novels in the present
dav ! " he exclaims when, in his De fuventute^ he
glances back into the past. " O Scottish Chiefs,
didn't we weep over you ! O Mysteries of Udolpho,
didn't I and Briggs Minor draw pictures out of you ! "
In fact, his was the childhood proper to a writer of

6 THACKERAY

romance, and if his career at school was undistin-
guished either by vice or virtue, it was by no means
fruitless. The young Thackeray was already observ-
ant, and not only did he know how to use his eyes,
but he could store up his experience. He, too, saw
the celebrated fight between Berry and Biggs; he,
too, rejoiced that at the I02d round Biggs, the bully,
failed to come up to time ; he, too, marvelled at the
dignity of the head-boy, whom he confidently be-
lieved would be Prime Minister of England, and who,
he was surprised to find in after-life, did not top six
feet. Like unnumbered others, he remembered the
time when the big boys wore moustaches and smoked
cigars, and he cherished the memory — this one unique
• — of " old Hawkins," the cock of the school, who
once thrashed a bargee at Jack Randall's in Slaughter
House Lane. In brief, he carried from the Charter-
house the true flavour of the place, and if he left
behind him all knowledge of the classics, he was
already more apt for literature than the famous head-
boy himself.

But he did not love the Charterhouse until he had
created it for himself. Not even the presence of such
friends as Liddell, Venables, and John Leech atoned
for Russell's savagery. The Doctor's eye was always
upon him, whom he denounced for " an idle, shuf-
fling, profligate boy," and in the last letter written
from school the boy desires nothing so much as a re-
lease from his bondage. " There are but three hun-
dred and seventy in the school," he wrote ; " I wish
there were only three hundred and sixty-nine." So

BIOGRAPHICAL 7

in 1828 he said a joyous good-bye to the Doctor, to
Biggs and Berry and all the rest, and prepared him-
self with his stepfather's help to enter the University
of Cambridge. IVinity was his college, and William
Whewell was his tutor, and while he loved his col-
lege, he cherished neither sympathy nor respect for
the great man who wrote The Plurality of Worlds.
Crump, in The Snob Papers., the Grand Llama who
would not permit an undergraduate to sit down in his
presence, owes something to that Master of Trinity
whom Sir Francis Doyle called " God's greatest
work," and whom Thackeray attacked with a violence
that was neither humorous nor just. Moreover, his
brief sojourn at Cambridge — he stayed but four terms
— was undistinguished. It has been told a dozen
times how he was a bye-term man and took a fourth
class in his May, but these details are of no impor-
tance : it is enough to remember that he belonged to
as brilliant a set as has rarely illuminated either uni-
versity, and that at Trinity he made his first experi-
ments in literature.

The friend of Tennyson, FitzGerald, Monckton
Milnes, and Kinglake — to say nothing of John Allen,
Brookfield, and Kemble — was not likely to refrain his
hand from the English language, and Thackeray's
ambition was assured. It is characteristic that his
first step was in the direction of university journalism,
and he enhanced the vapid humour of The Snob ^ with

' " The Snob, a Literary Journal, not conducted by members of
the University," was published by W. H. Smith of Rose Crescent
in 1829. Eleven numbers appeared, of which the first was dated

8 THACKERAY

a few specimens of verse and prose. Timbuctoo, the
parody of a prize poem, is his, and he ingenuously
records how proud he was to hear it praised by those
who knew not its authorship. It is not a sparlcling
travesty ; indeed it is chiefly memorable because the
subject, given out for the Chancellor's Medal, sug-
gested a set of verses to Tennyson in which the
master's genius is already revealed. Thackeray's,
also, were the reflections of Dorothea Julia Ramsbot-
tom, while he claimed with a proper pride the simple
advertisement : " Sidney Sussex College. — Wanted a
few Freshmen ; please apply at the Buttery."

Once he had seen himself in print, Thackeray did
not pause, and he claimed an active share in The
Gownsman ' which followed The Snob. There is noth-

April 9. Lettsom and Brookfield are reputed to have been its
editors. In addition to the contributions mentioned above, Thack-
eray wrote a set of verses " To Genevieve," and is said to have
written the whole of No. 8, with the editor's help, in five hours.
Much ingenuity has been spent by bibliographers in detecting
Thackeray's hand here or there. But the ingenuity is wasted,
since the humour of Tie Snob does not even hold the promise of
better things. It should be noted that " snob " in the cant of 1829
meant a townsman, and that the little journal was not the herald
of The Snob Papers.

' Of The Gownsman seventeen numbers were published, the first
on November 5, 1829, the last on February 25, 1830. A note in
Edward FitzGerald's copy of The Gownsman suggested that the
contributions signed 9 were from the hand of Thackeray. But the
matter was put beyond doubt by Mr. C. P. Johnson, who, writing
in The Athenceum, April 30, 1887, pointed out that the manuscript
of one of these contributions, a set of rhymes entitled " I'd be a
Tadpole," existed in Mr. Sabin's possession, written and signed by
Thackeray. All those, therefore, which are signed 9 may confi-

BIOGRAPHICAL

ing sparkling in its eighteen numbers, and the wonder
is that it survived two terms. Meanwhile more serious
projects engrossed him, and he destined a paper upon
The Revolt of Islam for The Chimara, a journal which
never made its appearance. But with that zest of life
which always distinguished him, he had other than
literary interests. In his second year, we are told, he
plunged into the many extravagances which presently
involved Pendennis in ruin, and, like Pendennis, he
profited enormously. Duns, no doubt, followed the
purveyors of little dinners up his chastened staircase,
and if he took his fate less tragically than Arthur Pen-
dennis, he, too, suffered remorse and embarrassment.
But the compensations were obvious. The friendships
which he made ended only with his life, and he must
have been noble, indeed, who was the friend of Alfred
Tennyson and of Edward FitzGerald. Moreover,
Cambridge taught him the literary use of the univer-
sity, as the Charterhouse had taught him the literary
use of a public school. In a few chapters of Penden-
nis he sketched the life of an undergraduate, which
has eluded all his rivals save only Cuthbert Bede. He
sketched it, moreover, in the true spirit of boyish ex-
travagance, which he felt at Cambridge, and preserved
even in the larger world of London ; and if Trinity

dently be ascribed to Thackeray, and it is highly probable that he
wrote others as well. Anthony Trollope, for instance, is doubtless
right in giving him credit for the general dedication : " To all
Proctors, past, present, and future, . . . whose taste it is our
privilege to follow, whose virtue it is our duty to imitate, whose
presence it is our interest to avoid." But the discussion is rather
curious than profitable.

lO THACKERAY

and the rustling gown of Mr. Whewell had taught
him nothing more than this, he would not have con-
templated them in vain.

For Thackeray, while he had neglected scholarship,
had already learnt the more valuable lessons of life
and travel — lessons not one of which he forgot when
he sat him down to the composition of fiction. Paris
had always been familiar to him, and no sooner had
he made up his mind to leave Cambridge than he set
out — in 1830 — for Germany. He visited Weimar,
the quietude of whose tiny Court he celebrated when
he drew his sketch of Pumpernickel and its society ;
and there he gave himself up to the study of German
literature and to the worship of Goethe. Already his
head was full of literary schemes. He would trans-
late the German ballads into English, he would write
a treatise upon German manners : in brief, he adopted
and dismissed the innumerable projects which cloud
the brain of ambitious youth. But, what is more im-
portant, he made his first entry into " society," and he
saw Goethe. In Eraser's Magazine of January, 1840,
there are some Recollections of Germany which may
be ascribed to him, and in which are set forth the per-
turbation of a young student who confronts the pon-
tiff of letters for the first time. But a letter, addressed
to G. H. Lewes, presents a better picture, and proves
that a quarter of a century had not dimmed the youth-
ful impression.

" Five-and-twenty years ago," thus he wrote in
1855, " at least a score of young English lads used to
live at Weimar for study, or sport, or society : all of

BIOGRAPHICAL 1 1

which were to be had in the friendly little Saxon
capital. The Grand Duke and Duchess received us
with the kindliest hospitality. The Court was splen-
did, but most pleasant and homely. We were invited
in our turn to dinners, balls, and assemblies there.
Such young men as had a right appeared in uniforms,
diplomatic and military. Some, I remember, invented
gorgeous clothing : the kind old Hof-Marschall of
those days. Monsieur de Spiegel (who had two of the
most lovely daughters eyes ever looked on), being in
no wise difficult as to the admission of these young
Englanders." So Thackeray spent his days in the
study of literature and in a pleasant hero-worship.
He purchased Schiller's sword, and he saw Goethe.
" Vidi tantum," said he ; "I saw him but three times."
But the image was ineffaceable. " Of course I re-
member well," again Thackeray speaks, " the per-
turbation of spirit with which, as a lad of nineteen, I
received the long-expected intimation that the Herr
Geheimrath would see me on such a morning. This
notable audience took place in a little ante-chamber
of his private apartments, covered all round with
antique casts and bas-reliefs. He was habited in a
long grey or drab redingote, with a white neckcloth
and a red ribbon in his buttonhole. He kept his hands
behind his back, as in Rauch's statuette. His com-
plexion was very bright, clear, and rosy. His eyes
extraordinarily dark, piercing, and brilliant. I felt
quite afraid before them, and recollect comparing
them to the eyes of the hero of a certain romance
called Melmoth the Wanderer." But Thackeray was

12 THACKERAY

relieved to find that the great man spoke French with
not a good accent, was emboldened to send him
Eraser's Magaxine^ and heard with pride that he had
deigned to look at some of his drawings. The meet-
ing is a link in the unbroken chain of literary tradi-
tion, and it is not surprising that Thackeray should
have guarded a proud memory of the poet who lit the
torch of romanticism, then — in 1830 — dazzling the
eyes of Europe.

Meanwhile he was intent upon a profession.
Though only twenty he reflected that at that age his
father had seen five years' service, and the inaction
irked him. Accordingly he chose the law, and read
for a while in the chambers of Mr. Taprell, a well-
known conveyancer. But the study of deeds did not
long engross him. The few months which he spent
in London were devoted to the companionship of his
friends and to the practice of caricature. He smoked
pipes with FitzGerald and Tennyson, he frequented
the theatres with John Kemble, and under the aus-
pices of Charles Buller he presently got his first in-
sight into Radical politics. Indeed he gave his help
in canvassing Liskeard for his friend, who sat on the
Liberal side of the first reformed Parliament, and so
well did the Cornish electors remember him that they
would have elected him many years afterwards as their
representative. But he tired of politics as speedily as
of law, and went ofF to Paris to study painting and
French literature. And then came the opportunity
of journalism. He deserted the atelier of Gros (or
another) for the office of The National Standard^ and

BIOGRAPHICAL

13

henceforth, save for a brief interval, he followed the
trade of letters.

No writer has suffered more bitterly than Thack-
eray from the indiscreet zeal of admirers. Nothing
that he ever wrote has seemed to the bibliographers too
trivial for preservation. To " spot " his contribu-
tions to Eraser's and other magazines has become a
kind of parlour game for the cultured, and since his
death many pieces have been unearthed which he no
doubt was happy to forget. The injustice of this
practice is obvious. Thackeray had abundant time
in which to collect the work by which he chose to be
remembered, and no good purpose is served by the
pious ingenuity of those who bind up into books the
experiments in journalism overlooked by himself.
The excellence of Vanity Fair imparts no quality to
a set of articles contributed fifteen years previously to
a dead newspaper. However, it is now idle to ignore
hh juvenilia, and though they throw little light upon
his maturer works, as editors are wont to pretend,
it may be said that he emerges from a trying ordeal
far better than would the most of men. Literature
was in his blood ; he was born with a style which
was neither involved nor extravagant ; his apprentice-
ship to the other arts was an interlude ; and at an
age when most are wrestling with the stubbornness
of our English tongue, he was already proprietor and
editor of a newspaper.

Whatever we may think of the venture, we can
have no doubt of Thackeray's courage and enterprise.
To own and to edit a newspaper is always a desper-

H

THACKERAY

ate hazard, more easily faced, it is true, with the
half-conscious recklessness of youth than with the
settled calm of maturer years. Now, Thackeray was
no more than twenty-one when he purchased and
managed The National Standard, a paper which had
survived eighteen numbers without distinction. Its
editor had been Mr. F. W. M. Bayley, and Thack-
eray noted the transference of responsibility with an
expected quip. " We have got rid of the old Bailey,"
said he, " and changed the governor." The change
availed him as little as his energy. He not only
edited the paper — he wrote for it, he illustrated it, he
supplied it with foreign correspondence. Neither
his drawings nor his articles do him much credit.
They are youthful chiefly in their immaturity. No
doubt they appealed pleasantly to the taste of the
time at which they were written. The Romantic
movement in France had encouraged a love of whatever
was strange or supernatural, and we find Thackeray
caught up, against his wont, in the humour of the
moment. Now he is found translating Hoffman and
The Mahabarata, or sketching the Charruas Indians
at the inspiration of the ingenious Janin. Now he
essays a story of his own, and in The Devil 's IVager,
afterwards adapted for The Paris Sketchbook, proves
that he, commonly untouched by movements, felt at
least a side-wind of romanticism. But all in vain.

The National Standard was " hauled down," to
use his own phrase, after it had floated but a few
months in the breeze, and Thackeray, thrown back
upon painting, worked in the studios of Brine and

BIOGRAPHICAL I5

Gros, or copied the Old Masters industriously in the
Louvre. Meantime he continued to make experi-
ments in literature, found his way to the office of
Eraser's Magazine, and was buying experience at not
too high a rate. His own experience was doubtless
that of Mr. Batchelor in Lovel the Widower. That
unfortunate gentleman, it will be remembered, pur-
chased The Museum from his friend Honeyman, who
" was in dreadful straits for money," and a " queer
wine-merchant and bill-discounter" named Sherrick.
Thackeray, like Batchelor, " gave himself airs as
editor" — that is certain. He, too, " proposed to ed-
ucate the public taste, to diffuse morality and sound
literature throughout the nation." But his fortune
was not yet exhausted ; the gutters of Fleet Street
still yawned ; and what had been saved from The Na-
tional Standard was presently engulfed by the hapless
Constitutional.

While Thackeray had squandered a part of his patri-
mony, his stepfather. Major Carmichael Smyth, had
made unlucky investments, and father and son, whose
equal friendship suggests the tie which bound Clive
Newcome to the Colonel, collaborated in founding
a Radical paper. Such heavy artillery as Grote and
Molesworth came to their aid, and the banner under
which they fought bore the proud title of The Constitu-
tional. Thackeray was appointed correspondent in
Paris, where for some six months he discharged his
duties in the proper spirit of Radicalism. No doubt
he was influenced by his journal ; no doubt the con-
pciousness that the austere Grote had his eye upon

l6 THACKERAY

him encouraged him to dulness. But the truth is
that Thaciceray's letters to The Constitutional are par-
ticularly grave. They express the commonplaces of
his party. The misdemeanours of Louis Philippe
are sternly admonished, and the easy escape of Louis
Napoleon after the descent upon Strassburg naturally
suggests that there is one law for the rich and another
for the poor. Yet The Constitutional proves clearly
enough that Thackeray was a competent journalist.
His work may not be absolutely intelligent; it is
nevertheless remarkable that a man of twenty-five
should write with so stern a repression of himself.
The letters have very little fancy ; their style is of
the tamest ; and though Thackeray knew the temper
of the Parisians well enough, though he foresaw the
downfall of the Orleans family, his gift of prophecy
is not brilliant. But he had the trick of leader-writ-
ing, and had he not been a humourist, he might have
made the columns of The Times reverberate with its
own kind of thunder.

The downfall of The Constitutional xendicreA Thack-
eray penniless. The rupees gathered in India were
all dissipated in journalism and gambling. While
Fleet Street had swallowed much, the card-table had
also claimed its share. The fate of Mr. Dawkins,
who lost his fortune to the ingenious Mr. Deuceace,
had been Thackeray's own. " I have not seen that
man," he told Sir Theodore Martin of a gambler at
Spa, " since he drove me down in his cabriolet to my
banker's in the City, where I sold out my patrimony
and handed it over to him." But not only had he

BIOGRAPHICAL 1 7

lost his patrimony ; he had incurred an added respon-
sibility, having married Miss Creagh Shawe, a lady of
Doneraile, at the British Embassy in Paris ; so that
in 1837, when he returned to London and the maga-
zines, he was no better ofF than other adventurers
who work for their bread. Indeed, as he told Mrs.
Brookfield, he once wrote with Longueville Jones in
Galignani' s Messenger for ten francs a-day, and he in-
stalled himself in Great Coram Street without a very
clear prospect of success.

But temperament and experience were in his
favour. He was far better equipped for the craft
of letters than the most of his contemporaries. He
knew something of the great world which lies beyond
Cambridge and London ; he had studied the life of
foreign cities ; and he had sojourned in no place
which had not contributed something to the material
of his art. Being no recluse, he had always mixed
freely with his fellows : he was as familiar with such
haunts as the Cider Cellars and the Coal Hole as with
the stolid mansions of Bloomsbury or the more ele-
gant palaces of Belgravia. The fact that at five-and-
twenty he had got rid of a comfortable fortune proves
that he faced life with a certain recklessness, and his
intelligence was warrant enough that the money had
not been squandered in vain. Nor was his tempera-
ment less happy than his education. Energy, cour-
age, and good spirits were his. In the letters of
FitzGerald you get a glimpse of him, pleasure-loving,
humorous, and alert. Now he is pouring contempt
upon the works of Raphael, now he is poking fun at

1 8 THACKERAY

Spedding's venerable forehead, which he and Fitz-
Gerald "found somehow or other in all things, just
peering out of all things." Thackeray saw it in a
milestone. " He also drew the forehead rising with
a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the
Lake of Geneva." And his character, joyous and
confident, was not hidden from those who saw him.
It shines boldly in his aspect, as it is revealed by
Maclise in his drawing of the Fraserians. A big
burly man he was — Carlyle a few years later described
him as " a half-monstrous Cornish giant " — with a
mass of hair kempt or unkempt in the romantic
fashion, a high-stock about his neck, and an eye-glass
stuck insolently in his eye. Old for his years in looks
as in experience, he held his own with such captains
of the press as Lockhart and Maginn, and was ready
to engage in the violent warfare of letters with as fine
a spirit as any of them.

CHAPTER II

THACKERAY IN LONDON. THE TOWN AND TASTE OF
HIS TIME

When Thackeray came to seek his fortune in Lon-
don, Queen Victoria had just ascended the throne, but
the view of life generally known as Early Victorian
was already fashionable. The excesses of the Dandies
had suffered the natural reaction : elegance was re-
placed by a certain coarseness, of which an exagger-
ated sentimentality was a necessary part. Elegance
is apt to be heartless, while coarseness finds an excuse
in a noisy appeal to the more obvious emotions, and
the emotions of 1837 were neither subtle nor re-
strained. It was an age, in fact, which saw D'Orsay
disputing the sovereignty of Red Herrings, and which
found a satisfaction in unctuously deploring that
nobleman's lapses from the path of virtue. Com-
mercial prosperity, moreover, had diffused whatever
culture the epoch might boast, and the culture had
become all the thinner for the diffusion. Wealth,
divorced from manners and intelligence, marked the
rise to power of the great middle class, while rail-
ways^ drove the country still farther on the road to

' Charles Greville describe; how, on July 18, 1837, he entered a
train for the first time. He records that " the first sensation is a
slight degree of nervousness, and a feeling of being run away

19

20 THACKERAY

democracy. An increase in the number of clubs
proves that a desire of social success was general, and
assuredly the chronicler of snobs found his material
ready to his hand. P'or the vast fortunes acquired by
industry threatened to overshadow the eminence of
birth or talent, and the Young England movement,
which startled England some seven years later, was
but a protest of the upper and lower classes against
the domination of the prosperous and arrogant class
which came between them.

The popular amusements suiFered a like decay.
Eccentricity and exoticism seemed of higher account
than beauty and good sense. The Back Kitchen and
the Cave of Harmony, to give them Thackeray's own
titles, were the most eagerly frequented haunts of the
day, and though of their kind they were excellent,
they did not illustrate the virtue of elegance and re-
finement. But their sudden rise to popularity is an
interesting chapter in the history of manners, and no
writer has pictured them more vividly than Thackeray.
They were, like their age, strange mixtures of black-
guardism and sentiment. Heartrending allusions to
angels alternated in their songs with such pieces of
brutal realism as Sam Hall or The Body-Snatcher.
The celebrated Hodgen, who sang this blood-curdling
masterpiece to Pendennis and Warrington in the Back
Kitchen, appeared " sitting on a coffin, with a flask

with, but a sense of security soon supervenes, and the velocity is
delightful." He also tells us, with what to-day appears ingenuous-
ness, that an engineer was turned off by the company for going at
the rate of forty-five miles an hour.

THACKERAY IN LONDON 21

of gin before him, with a spade, and a candle stuck
in a skull." The very glasses quivered on the table
as with terror, and no other singer had a chance
against the Snatcher.

The haunts themselves were appropriate to their
entertainment. They were commonly long rooms,
running along the first floor of public-houses, and
while the chairman smiled blandly at the end of a
long table, and flourished a portentous cigar, his cus-
tomers supped or sipped their brandy-and-water. For
many years there were no regular singers ; visitors
" obliged " as complaisantly as did Colonel Newcome
before his ears were shocked by ribaldry, and the few
artists engaged were content with three or four shil-
lings a-week, with a screw of tobacco thrown in.
Now and again, however, a star arose above the hori-
zon, a star such as the famous John W. Sharp,^ who
in Thackeray's day shone brilliantly upon the Cave
of Harmony. 'Jim Crow, as he sang it after the
American Rice, is still a splendid memory, and one
is not surprised that the chairman's announcement,

1 John W. Sharp was for long the King of the Concert-Room,
and Thackeray must have known him well. He made his first
appearance at Evans's in 1839, and attracted crowds thither for
some seven years. He shared a lodging at Hampstead with Labern,
a rascal who knew better than any of his contemporaries how to
write a popular song, and after the manner of their kind they
travelled the same road to the devil. During an interlude John
W. Sharp managed the Lord Nelson Music Hall in Euston
Square, where he sang the Corsican Brothers and Paul Pry in
character. He died m 1856, and was by far the most accom-
plished and engaging of his class.

22 THACKERAY

" I claim your attention for a comic song from Mr.
Sharp," was greeted with immense applause. But,
like Mr. Hodgen, John W. Sharp retired presently to
Vauxhall Gardens ; and so long as the great Labern
was sober enough to write his songs, he triumphed
over all audiences with a daring mixture of savagery
and pathos, which is as intimately characteristic of
his age as the early romances of Sir Edward Bulwer.

The literary world differed little enough from the
world of society : for all its noble sentiments, it was
marked by bad taste and lack of restraint. The rep-
utation of Scott had got its second wind, so to say,
but the other great men were either forgotten or ill-
considered. Coleridge and Lamb belonged to the
previous generation, and Dickens was only just rising
above the horizon. Sketches by Boz had heralded a
new talent, and Pickwick was already on the road to
immortality. Indeed, Thackeray, as he confessed
many years afterwards at a dinner of the Royal
Academy, had carried a bundle of sketches up to
Furnivall's Inn after Seymour's suicide, and had ap-
plied to the youthful Dickens for the post of illus-
trator. But the year of Victoria's accession to the
throne held very little of hope or promise. Literature
had become less an art than a fashionable pastime.
Lord Byron had shown the world that a title was not
incompatible with genius, and many a sprig of nobility
thought that the certainty of genius resided in his
birth. That amusing humbug, Don Telesforo de
Trueba y Cosio, had startled the town with The In-
cognito^ or Sins and Peccadillos, while Lord Mulgrave

THACKERAY IN LONDON

23

hoped that his title might atone for such stuff as
Matilda and The Contrast. Sir Egerton Brydges had
proved that mechanical industry might turn out son-
nets, or achieve epics, while Sir Edward Bulwer was
eloquently testifying that nothing was impossible to a
new-made baronet. Even the Dandies were incom-
plete if they had put no volume to their credit, and
it redounds to the honour of the peerless D'Orsay
that he did not essay literature as well as the other
arts.

For Lady Blessington's industry an ample excuse
may be found : hers was the facility of a sanguine
Irish brain, and in the Keepsakes and Books of Beauty
she crystallised the prevailing taste with an ingenious
lack of humour. In truth, no age ever parodied
itself more prettily than did this one in its vapid
bundles of poetry and portraiture. The lady who
languished in a " bertha " worried the Muses with the
same careless effrontery as the fop who ruffled it in
the coats of Stultz. And if perchance an author
might boast no title, there were nobles enough among
the characters of a popular novel to fill the House of
Lords or pack the country houses of England. In
Miss Landon's Ethel Churchill — -to take a casual in-
stance — the reader is introduced to Lord Wharton,
to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to Alexander Pope
himself, and it was Ethel Churchill which Thackeray
himself approved with more than half his heart in the
savage columns of Eraser's.

But mixed up with the popular gentility was a keen
enjoyment of " low life." The coarseness in man-

24

THACKERAY

ners which, I have said, is the natural companion of
sentimentality, was equally matched by a coarseness
in literature. Pelham is not content to be a " gentle-
man " ; he must also patter the flash ; and while the
hero masqueraded as a cracksman, so the cracksman
seemed a hero to the sentimental novelist. " The
ruffian cly thee Guinea Pig, for stashing the lush " is
as intimately a part of Bulwer's work as such exam-
ples of hysteria as, " O that woman's love ! how
strong it is in its weakness ! how beautiful in its
guilt ! " But Ainsworth played the game with more
fancy, and with a better success than Bulwer. For
Ainsworth's highwaymen are all marvels of sensi-
bility ; his very housebreakers crack their cribs with
the best of motives, and wipe away a tear of heart-
broken regret as they go ofF with the swag.

And side by side with a fiction made ridiculous by
false sentiment, there flourished a method of criticism
which knew no sentiment at all. Bulwer was noth-
ing if not genteel ; there was little gentility in
Macaulay or Croker, in Lockhart or Maginn. Such
critics as these attacked their victim with the gloves
off, nor did they hesitate to punish literary incom-
petence with a ferocity which the worst vices might
have inspired. Flouts and gibes were better to their
purpose than solid argument, and on occasion the
best of them did not shrink from gross personalities.
Lockhart, " the Scorpion that delighteth to sting the
faces of men," had the prettiest method, while Croker
outdid them all, even Maginn himself, in brutality.
The Secretary to the Admiralty, not content with charg-

THACKERAY IN LONDON 25

ing Lady Morgan with " licentiousness, profligacy,
irreverence, blasphemy, libertinism, disloyalty, and
atheism," topped it all by calling her " a female Me-
thuselah." And if Maginn's savage attack upon
Grantley Berkeley were abundantly justified, no one
can help regretting the bad manners wherewith it was
conducted.

But the ferocity of the early Victorian critics is
easily explained. Party spirit ran high, and neither
Tory nor Whig could discover a speck of worth in
his opposite. While The Edinburgh was steadfast in
the opinion that Tories were as destitute of literary
talent as of moral rectitude, Blackwood' s^ Eraser's, and
The ^arterly were prepared to slaughter Whig poets
and Whig politicians in the name of patriotism.
Macaulay's onslaught upon Croker's Boswell is su-
perior in taste alone to Croker's own bludgeonings,
and the worst of Hazlitt's excesses did not justify the
monstrous contempt of Maginn and his band.*
Moreover, there is another excuse for the insolence
which prevailed. The best of the critics were scholars

' The savagery which was popular when Thackeray came to
London was no new thing. The critics had been straining their
vocabulary for more than five-and-twenty years. Maginn, writing
to William Blackwood in 1823, says of Hazlitt, "You have called
him pimpled, affected, ignorant, a Cockney scribbler, etc., but
what is that to what he has said of the most brilliant men of the
age ? Hook-nosed Wellington, vulture-beaked Southey, hanging-
browed Croker, down-looking Jack Murray, and Mudford fat as
fleecy-hosiery." Here the advantage is on Hazlitt's side. But
the habit of abuse had not grown weaker with time, and it
culminated in Fraser's Magazine.

26 THACKERAY

and men of taste, who were not unnaturally lashed to
fury at the praises ignobly lavished upon amateurs.
Whenever they remembered that literature and
politics were not indissolubly connected, their slash-
ings were justified, and it may wisely be pleaded in
their defence that they held aloft the banner of their
calling. Their most heinous fault, then, was a fault
of manners, not of intelligence, and the memory of
such critics as Hazlitt and Macaulay, Lockhart and
Maginn, will be secure when the names of many
victims whose vanity they ridiculed are lost in
oblivion. Had it not been for The Edinburgh who
would ever have heard of Montgomery .?

Such was the world of letters into which Thackeray
came, and his attitude from the first was an attitude
of protest, as, indeed, we should expect of a writer
whose humour and outlook, when they were not his
own, were borrowed from the eighteenth century.
It was a strange accident that enrolled him under
Eraser's flag ; but though he was a Whig fighting on
the side of High-Toryism, he remained loyal at once
to himself and his colleagues. His criticism was
seldom coloured by his environment. Maybe he
praised Miss Landon, who was a favourite of
Maginn's, more highly than he would have done, had
he enjoyed the freedom of another magazine. It is
possible that had he written elsewhere he would not
have detected "a hundred beautiful poems " in Ethel
Churchill ; but it chimed exactly with his taste and
temper to demolish Bulwer and Ainsworth, and them
he demolished with the best of spirits. However, it

THACKERAY IN LONDON

27

was probably the influence of Maginn which attracted
Thackeray to Eraser's. He had met this gay and
dashing free-lance as early as 1832, so that when he
began gravely to write for the magazines the ac-
quaintance was already of some years' standing. At
the outset he was charmed, like many another, with
the brilliant talk and enthusiastic scholarship of
Maginn, who taught him, he tells us, to appreciate
Homer, and engaged him to read a passage every
day.

But not only had he known Maginn ; when he re-
turned to London in 1837 he had already tried his
pen in the pages of Regina., as the initiate were
pleased to call the magazine. His contributions to
Eraser's have not all been identified, and perhaps it
is as well they should be left hidden where they
admirably served their turn. Yet there is little doubt
that Elizabeth Brownrigge : a Tale, in which the lusus
natura school of literature, and its prime example,
Eugene Aram, are burlesqued, is from Thackeray's
hand. It betrays his touch in matter as in manner ;
and since it was published, in 1832, a few months
after his early meeting with Maginn, it must e'en have
been composed in a first flush of enthusiasm. A
piece or two followed in 1834 and 1835, and, as has
been said, Thackeray appears in Maclise's group of
the Fraserians ; but from 1837 onwards he is stead-
fast in loyalty, and after that year Oliver Yorke had
no better supporter.

He wrote under many names, by this time familiar
— M. A. Titmarsh, Jeames Yellowplush, Fitz--

28 THACKERAY

Boodle, Dolly Duster, and what not. He turned his
facile hand to anything : stories, criticism of books
and pictures, correspondence from Paris — he managed
them all with gaiety and address. The sentimental
ruffian was the favourite object of his attack, and it
is not strange that the champion of Fielding's irony
should run atilt at Bulwer and Ainsworth. Now he
throws his criticism into the shape of a story, now he
lets Jeames Yellowplush wield the tomahawk for
him. He was savage, like his colleagues — too savage,
he afterwards confessed to Bulwer with an apology ;
but it must be said in his defence that time has amply
justified whatever savagery he displayed. Oddly
enough, it was the painters who found the greater
ofFence in his criticism, and they were angry without
warrant.' For never was there a more amiable and
misguided judge of the pictorial art. Yet Thackeray
had painted in the studios, he had copied in the
Louvre, he was indefatigable in the illustration of
what he saw. But he took no more into a picture-
gallery than a trick of picturesque prose, a faculty of
indiscreet appreciation, much prudery, and a good
heart.

The sentiment with which he examined a picture
was irreproachable ; the keenness wherewith he looked
through the paint and canvas to the purpose behind it
is miraculous; "the intention of Mulready's Seven
Agei" says he, " is godlike." He protests, like the
Early Victorian that he was, against Etty's nudity : a
Sleeping Nymph he finds so naked " as to be unfit for
• See FitzGerala's Letters (1894), vol. i. p. 193.

THACKERAY IN LONDON

79

appearance among respectable people at an exhibition."
Alas, for the respectable people of 1838 ! But not
only does he espy the disease ; he discovers a remedy :
" A large curtain of fig-leaves should be hung over
every one of Etty's pictures, and the world should
pass on, content to know that there are some glorious
colours beneath." That is prudishness reduced to the
absurd. One doubts whether even the respectable
Victorians would have found pleasure in the knowl-
edge that somewhere or other a mass of glorious
colour was covered by fig-leaves. But Etty " offended
propriety " as badly as David or Girodet, and there
was an end on't.

However, if Etty was rather too " human," the
classics were not human enough, and Thackeray's
scorn of the cold, marmoreal Greeks was eloquent
even for his age. The Gothic cult, encouraged by
the Romantic movement, inspired him to an excess of
zeal, to an outbreak of sentiment, which to-day are
hardly intelligible. " The contemplation of such
specimens of Greek art as we possess hath always, to
tell the truth, left us in a state of unpleasant wonder-
ment and perplexity. It carries corporeal beauty to a
pitch of painful perfection, and deifies the body and
bones truly ; but, by dint of sheer beauty, it leaves
humanity altogether inhuman — quite heartless and
passionless." Thus Thackeray at a moment when
we " possessed " the Elgin Marbles ! Mere beauty,
in his view, should be fig-leaved as tightly as mere
colour, and the world be free to admire the school
which teaches that " love is the first and highest ele-

3°

THACKERAY

merit of beauty in art." Nor is this the worst ; his
hint to amateurs concerning pictures and their merits
is, " Look to have your heart touched by them." So,
too, he finds a picture by Eastlake " as pure as a Sab-
bath hymn sung by the voices of children," and would
reserve " one of the best places in the gallery " for
the coldly chaste productions of Ary Scheffer. With
the same sentimentality of purpose he thinks William
Hunt as good as Hogarth, and objects to Delacroix
with the irrelevant question, " What's the use of be-
ing uncomfortable?" "Skill and handling are great
parts of a painter's trade, but heart is the first," thus
he sums up the question ; " this is God's direct gift
to him, and cannot be got in any academy, or under
any master ; " and never elsewhere does he more
clearly acknowledge the limitations imposed upon him
by his age. Many months passed in the studios of
Paris had taught him no more than a jargon which
Ruskin adopted as his own, and the appreciation of a
certain M. Biard, whose " Slave Trade " — now hap-
pily forgotten — seems to have shaken London to its
very foundations. But the criticism of painting did
not long engross Thackeray, who was trying his hand
at the art of fiction, and who had already won the
praise of his friends, though the approval of the peo-
ple, in his own view the best judges, was withheld
for a weary ten years.

But if his stories did not please the people, they
afi^orded the best possible training to himself. Not
only did they give him the experience which he
lacked, but they were, so to say, sketches for his

THACKERAY IN LONDON

31

larger works. The same characters, the same names,
the same situations were afterwards used by him with
more conspicuous success. A Shabby Genteel Story
grew into Philip, and though the process is not always
so clearly visible, the stories contributed obscurely to
Eraser's and The New Monthly were the germs of the
novels which won for Thackeray his fame and name.
But the stories are best worth studying, because they
prove that he was at the outset inspired by the views
which characterised his maturer talent. A strange
mixture of contemptuous irony and that particular
kind of sentimentalism known as Early Victorian, he
seems to snigger behind his sobs, and to weep under
the secure cover of contemptuous irony. The worst
is that he could not, either early or late, keep his two
methods separate, so that while his pathos does not
melt the wise to tears, his irony is seldom sustained at
a perfect level. Catherine^ for instance, is excused
on the ground that it was'written "to counteract the
injurious influence of some popular fictions of the
day,, which made heroes of highwaymen and burglars,
and created a false sympathy for the vicious and crim-
inal." But if the excuse strikes a false note, what
shall we say of a writer who, in attempting an ironic
presentation, declares that " though we are only in the
third chapter of this history, we feel almost sick of
the characters that appear in it, and the adventures
which they are called upon to go through " ?

1 Catherine appeared in Fraser's Magazine in 1 839-40, and was
not published in a book until 1869, when it was included in volume
22 of the Library Edition.

32

THACKERAY

Such a confession as this produces precisely the
effect which Thackeray wishes to avoid. It intro-
duces an element of morality into a scene which is
only reputable if moral and immoral have changed
places. Fielding in 'Jonathan Wild lashes no other
character with the scorn of his disapproval than
Heartfree, whose behaviour is " low and pitiful," and
whose wretched soliloquy is properly described as
" full of low and base ideas, without a syllable of
greatness." In truth, irony can only exist in a uni-
form atmosphere : given Fielding's definition of great-
ness, 'Jonathan Wild is a masterpiece of wit. But
introduce into that masterpiece digressions upon right
and wrong in their usual acceptation, and you get a
confusion of epithets, an inextricable jumble of two
languages. Now, this is the too frequent fault of
Thackeray's experiments in irony : by suddenly
changing the atmosphere of his stories, he involves
himself in the same charge, which he brings with some
justice against Bulwer and Ainsworth. So often does
he halt between the two methods of expression, that
his meaning, doubtful to himself, is obscure to others.
More than once he discusses Catherine as though she
were not an instrument of irony but a living person.
He confesses that the story was " a mistake all
through. It was not made disgusting enough ;
. the author had a sneaking kindness for his
heroine, and did not like to make her quite worthless."

But the true ironist is impartial : he should permit
no hint to escape him of kindness or disgust ; he
should put the crimes of his hero or heroine in the

THACKERAY IN LONDON

light of achievements ; and he should rise superior to
the temptation of commentary. If in one sense
Catherine is not disgusting enough, in another it is too
disgusting. The author's intermittent partiality in-
creases the realism of the story, and that which should
be merely intellectual wears a semblance of morality.
Nor did Thackeray make the best of his material :
the life of Catherine Hayes, " the traitoress of Bir-
mingham," as it is told in the bald simplicity of The
Newgate Calendar, grips a firmer hold upon the fancy
than Thackeray's satire, which is chiefly interesting
as a step on the road towards the excellence of Barry
Lyndon. For Catherine Hayes was a very real per-
sonage, who murdered her weak, adoring husband with
a cold-blooded atrocity rare even in the eighteenth
century, and who was burned alive for " petty trea-
son " in 1726. Yet though the story was thus faith-
fully founded upon fact, it was construed as a delib-
erate attack upon Miss Catherine Hayes, the Irish
singer, and the Press of Ireland was fiercely indignant.
In a ballad, which he wrote at the time, and sent
many years after to Miss Procter, Thackeray cele-
brated the episode :

" A Saxon who thinks that he dthraws
Our porthraits as loike as two pays,
Insulted one day without cause
Our innocent singer, Miss Hayes.

" And though he meant somebody else
(At layst so the raycreant says,
Declaring that history tells

Of another, -a. wicked Miss Hayes),

34

THACKERAY

" Yet Ireland, the free and the brave.

Says, what's that to do with the case ?
How dare he, the cowardly slave,
To mintion the name of a Hayes ?
»*♦***
" The Freeman in language refined.

The Post whom no prayer can appayse,
Lashed fiercely the wretch who maligned
The innocent name of a Hayes.
******
" Accursed let his memory be,

Who dares to say aught in dispraise
Of Oireland, the land of the free,

And of beauty and janius and Hayes."

Nor did the trouble end here. Some ten years later a
set of young Irishmen ^ determined that Thackeray
had made a deliberate attempt to ruin their distin-
guished countrywoman ; and in revenge they deputed
a young gentleman to take lodgings opposite the nov-
elist's house, and await an opportunity of chastising
him. But Thackeray carried the war into the ene-
my's camp : he called upon the enraged Irishman,
told him the true history of the wicked Catherine
Hayes, and sent him back to Ireland without a thought
of revenge in his head. The anecdote is character-
istic of either side, and is the pleasantest incident in
the career, real or imagined, of Catherine Hayes.
Burlesque is bastard brother to irony, and if The

' This suggestion to horsewhip Thackeray was made after a ref-
erence to Catherine Hayes in Pendeiiitis ; but the real offence was
committed in the earlier story, and therefore it is most properly
discussed here. See Hfortiing Chronicle, April 12, 1850, Callers
and Anchovies, a piece of controversy in Thackeray's best maimer.

THACKERAY IN LONDON

35

Tremendous Adventures of Major Gahagan are bur-
lesque at its maddest, the two methods are agreeably
blended in The Tellowplush Papers, which also first
sparkled in the pages of Eraser's. Now, when Jeames
is a pseudonym for the author, he is nothing more
than an excuse for bad spelling. (In his inception he
was called Charles, but it was as Jeames that he rose to
grandeur, and should be remembered.) His views are
the views not of a flunkey, but of Thackeray himself.
His Letters to the Literati, for instance, throw no light
upon his character, they mark no point in his prog-
ress. They do but assail the " Honrabble Barnet "
in terms of deeper contempt than Thackeray would
have used, had he written in his own name and with
his own pen. We may therefore dismiss all those
essays in which the name of Yellowplush is usurped,
and consider only such pages as throw the light of
autobiography upon the ingenious flunkey.

Jeames, indeed, is an engaging figure, and no sooner
does he step upon the stage than he wins our sym-
pathy. For he, too, is painted in the colours of irony,
and owes something of his character to the Dean of
St. Patrick's. It has been said that he was drawn, as
he appeared in Buckley Square, after Mr. Foster, the
gentleman who for many years contributed the Fash-
ionable Intelligence to The Morning Post. But this is
incredible : from the first day that he encountered Mr.
Altamont, he has the makings of a genuine flunkey,
whom you could not match outside the famous Direc-
tions to Servants. At the outset he adopted the right
attitude of snobbery towards his own kind — " them

36

THACKERAY

poor disrepattable creatures" he loftily calls them.
No sooner does he take service with Mr. Deuceace
than he reveals a sound knowledge of his craft.
" When you carry up a dish of meat," — thus the foot-
man is enjoined by Swift, — " dip your fingers in the
sauce, or lick it with your tongue, to try whether it
be good, and fit for your master's table." And Jeames
had already turned this philosophy into practice.
" There wasn't a bottle of wine," says he, " that we
didn't get a glass out of, nor a pound of sugar that we
didn't have some lumps of it." " We had keys to all
the cubbards — we pipped into all the letters that kern
and went — we pored over all the bill-files — we'd the
best pickens out of the dinners, the livvers of the
fowls, the forcemit balls out of the soup, the egs
from the sallit." All this they had as their rights, for
" a suvvant's purquisits is as sacred as the laws of
Hengland."

But if Jeames knew his rights, he knew also his
master's character. The Honrabble Halgernon was
a gambler and a swindler — that his servant saw ; but
he recognised that rank and birth can warrant the
last enormity. Yellowplush, then, is already a true
footman in Miss Shunt's Husband, that story of a
taboo, which may best be described as a modern
Cupid and Psyche, and he is a still finer expert in Mr.
Deuceace" s Amours. But it is not until he signs him-
self Fitz James de la Pluche * that he does perfect

' The earlier series of Yellowplush Papers was printed in Fraser's
Magazine in 1837-38, and republished in the Comic Tales and
Sketches of 1841. The Diary of C. Jeames de la Pluche did not

THACKERAY IN LONDON

37

justice to his talents. At last he was in the situation
which the author was best pleased to depict. He
was rising from one world to another, he was desert-
ing the servants'-hall for the drawing-room, and ex-
changing the fidelity of Mary Ann for the sly con-
tempt of Lady Angelina. He had become as fierce
a gambler as Mr. Deuceace himself; but it was not
the cards that tempted him — it was the railroads of
England ; and he played with such brilliant luck that
before long he was " a landed propriator — a Deppaty
Leftnant — a Capting." Under the auspices of his
friend. Lord Bareacres, he is presented at Court,
wearing upon his handsome brow the Halbert 'At —
" an 'at which is dear to the memory of hevery
Brittn ; an 'at which was invented by my Feald
Marshle, and adord Prins." However, the fall in
railway-stock is too much for the heroic de la Pluche :
with a note of warning against time-bargains, he re-
tires from the business of speculation, and settles
down with the still faithful Mary Hann at the " Wheel
of Fortune 'Otel." His name is simple Jeames
Plush once more, and he comes off better than most
upstarts. But his humour grows with the years, and
proves that Thackeray was a more highly accom-
plished master of his material in 1845 than when he
first came upon the town.

appear in Punch until 1845-46, and having been published by
Appleton of New York in 1853, first found its way into a volume,
on this side the Atlantic, in the Library Edition of 1869. But
since the later is a development of the earlier work, they are con-
sidered together in this place.

38

THACKERAY

But the sentimental stories which he contributed in
these early days to the magazines are yet more closely
characteristic of his talent, yet more loudly prophetic
of what he was presently to achieve. In A Shabby
Genteel Story ^ the snob, as he saw him, is already
triumphant. Already he can exclaim with rapture,
" O, free and happy Britons, what a miserable, truck-
ling, cringing race ye are ! " Already he is eloquent
in denunciation of the tuft-hunter, the lick-spittle, the
sneak, " the man of a decent middle rank, who affects
to despise it, and herds only with persons of the
fashion." The author's suspicion of snobbishness is
too alert, as it was in the after-time ; his censure of
the harmless vanity displayed by foolish men and
women is too savage; the pretensions of Mrs. Gann
are treated with too heavy a hand. But in A Shabby
Genteel Story we see the beginning of a talent, ex-
ercised in the direction which it would always take,
and misapplied with a wilfulness which was con-
stant. Between A Shabby Genteel Story and Philip
are many works worthily accomplished ; yet a
comparison of the two proves that what Thack-
eray was in 1840 that he remained in 1861. His
style had gained an immeasurable ease ; his view of
life was more settled, if no less sentimental. But the
same drama still attracted him : he was still happiest
in the contemplation of the petty problems which
agitate the minds of snobs, and so profound was his
consistency that he closed his career with the same

' This story was published in Fraser's Magazine in 1840, and
reprinted in the Miscellanies of 1855-57.

THACKERAY IN LONDON

39

gospel wherewith twenty years before he had com-
menced it.

A better story both in style and composition is The
History of Samuel Titmarsh and the Great Hoggarty
Diamond} Here, at any rate, is a promise of the best
that was to come ; here, at last, is something besides
gaiety of heart and a sense of social contrast. Of
course the social contrast is still the essence of the
story, but the humour and pathos, which particularly
distinguished Thackeray, are agreeably blended, and
there is undoubtedly a freshness in the telling that
should have pleased the jaded taste of the time.
However, the positive achievement of Thackeray's
early experiments in fiction is not great ; the most of
them might well have been forgotten, and forgotten
they would have been, had not a tiresome fashion
of curiosity necessitated, as I have said, the patient
collection of the odds and ends contributed to the
magazines. But though at the moment they brought
their author no fame and little profit, they were not
written in vain. Even had they been lost, they would
still have served their purpose in sharpening the tools
which he would presently use with greater ease and
skill.

Above all, they show that Thackeray was not pip-
ing to the tune of the time. Andrea Fitch, in A
Shabby Genteel Story, is a true child of 1830, Spanish
cloak, fragrant Oronoko and all ; there are traces of

' The Great Hoggarty Diamond made its first appearance in
Fraser's Magazine in 1 84 1, and was published as a book eight
years later.

4© THACKERAY

French influence in his contributions to The National
Standard; but for the rest Thackeray cared as little
for the Romantic Movement as for the performances
of Bulwer and Ainsworth. As Dickens went back
to the life of an earlier age, to our English lanes and
English inns, so Thackeray sought inspiration in an
earlier literature, and is far more closely related to
Goldsmith and Fielding than to his fantastic contem-
poraries. He seems to have come straight out of the
eighteenth century, and to have blotted from his
sight the pearls of fancy with which his contempora-
ries adorned their works. It is not wonderful, there-
fore, that he did not command popularity. A gener-
ation which delighted in titled authors and ruffianly
heroes took small pleasure in the sentimental sim-
plicity of The Great Hoggarty Diamond^ nor are you
surprised that the publishers of the magazine in
which it appeared demanded of its author a speedy
termination. But, for all that, Thackeray was not
discouraged. His buoyant temper could easily sup-
port the disdain of the people, especially as his friends
were eager in appreciation. The chastened approval
of FitzGerald, given to few, was surely enough to
justify high hopes of the future, especially since Ten-
nyson and Carlyle agreed with FitzGerald. Ster-
ling, no doubt, overdid his praise, when he wondered
whether Fielding or Goldsmith had done better than
The Great Hoggarty Diamond; but at least he had
noted Thackeray's inspiration, and saw in which di-
rection his friend's talent should develop.

So the year 1841 found Thackeray with an empty

THACKERAY IN LONDON 41

pocket, yet rich in the applause of his friends and in
the qualified approval of magazine-editors. But a
blow had fallen upon him, which literary success
could not soften. His wife, to whom he had been
married but a few short years, fell suddenly ill, and
though Thackeray hoped for a recovery until 1844,
she did not leave the maison de sant'e to which she had
been entrusted, and was never restored to health.
That Thackeray never ceased to mourn his broken
life is certain. " Though my marriage was a wreck,"
he wrote long afterwards, " I would do it over again,
for behold love is the crown and completion of all
earthly good." Nor was his wife's illness the only
sorrow which beset him. An infant daughter had
died in the year before, an event to which there is a
touching reference in The Great Hoggarty Diamond,
while poverty intensified the melancholy of a reserved
and sensitive man. Thus Thackeray's period of ex-
periment ended in sorrow and ill-success, for which
he would have been the last to claim a general sym-
pathy. So far as one can tell from the scanty refer-
ences in FitzGerald's Letters and elsewhere, he was
resolute to hide his troubles from his friends, and he
sought in work and travel the surest solace of all.
Those near to him knew the courage with which he
bore the assaults of adverse fortune ; but as he says
himself, " such things are sacred and secret," and a
stranger " has no business to place them on paper for
all the world to read."

CHAPTER III

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER BARRY LYNDON

We are nowadays so intimately acquainted with
the picturesque reporter, that we can hardly believe
in a time when he was not. He is the favourite of
the daily press, the one serious rival to the popular
novelist. He may be discovered, note-book in hand,
wherever steamboat or railroad can carry him. Now
he is greedily intent upon information ; now his aim
is to capture such random reflections as grow, like
wild-flowers, in the hedgerow. But whether it be
thought or fact which engages his mind, the result is
most often both trivial and transitory. He has sel-
dom the tact or the leisure to see, and he is perforce
content with hasty generalisations. He mistakes
that which happens once for an invariable circum-
stance, and an impolite porter is enough to involve
in a common charge a whole nation. So that while
the literature of " tourism " is ever increasing, it can-
not inflate our breasts with pride. But when Thack-
eray published his Paris Sketch Book^ in 1840, it was

1 The Sketch Book is a medley of fiction, politics, and criticism,
which had, with few exceptions, already seen the light in The
National Standard, in Fraser's Magazine, and elsewhere. Most
of the stories betray their origin. A Caution to Travellers, for
instance, describes the sorrows of an Englishman, who falls among
thieves in a Parisian gambling hell, and describes these sorrows
42

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 43

happily rare. True, the fashion had been set in the
decline of the eighteenth century by the nascent ro-
manticism of Gray. True, two men of conspicuous
talent had cast a curious eye upon France twenty
years before the revolution. Sterne had crossed the
Channel, that he might embroider his own sentimen-
tality upon the fringe of what was then a foreign
country ; while Smollett had journeyed to Nice, that
he might find health for himself, and might at his
leisure record the habits and customs of his neigh-
bours. After Sterne and Smollett came Arthur Young,
that austere farmer who would have planted Cham-
bord with turnips, whose thoughts were so easily di-
verted from the palaces of the great to drill-ploughs
and harrows, and who, nevertheless, foresaw the
coming reign of terror, which had been suspected by
none save himself and Lord Chesterfield. But

in terms which have been familiar ever since the publication in
1777 of La Quinzaine Angloise d Paris, ou I' Art de s'y ruiner en
peu de terns. To this " ouvrage posthume du docteur Stearne "
Thackeray ovees at least one scene in his story, unless we admit
that such scenes have been the common property of fiction since the
flood. In Little Poinsinet, again, Thackeray has drawn in ex-
travagant colours a poor poet, who once enjoyed a certain celeb-
rity, and who having fallen into abject poverty, drowned himself.
Casanova came across him more than once in his pilgrimage
through life, saved him from a watery grave in the Tiber, merely
that a few years later the Guadalquivir might engulf him. In
Casanova's phrase Poinsinet was " un tout petit jeune horame, laid,
plein de feu, plaisant, et qui avait du talent pour le scene."
Thackeray sets him in another light, which was doubtless tradi-
tional. As for Thackeray's Cartouche, he belongs less to history
than to fancy and the chap-books. But he is a lively vagabond all
the same.

44 THACKERAY

Thackeray did not need to go back to the eighteenth
century for an example. Charles Dickens, his great
contemporary, had already shown, in Sketches by Boz,
what sympathy and imagination might discover in
the familar haunts of one's own city. But, for all
that, when Thackeray set out to paint for his coun-
trymen the character and aspect of Paris, he was es-
saying, in the guise of a picturesque reporter, a kind
of writing as yet unstaled by sanguine ignorance and
the exigence of a daily paper.

From several points of view Thackeray seemed
well equipped for the task. He was the master of an
easy style, more familiar than correct, more boister-
ous than energetic. But such as it was, it fitted the
picturesque reporter like a glove. High spirits were
his constant companions, even when judgment de-
serted him for a while, and he carried his readers in
and out the theatres, picture-galleries, and gardens of
Paris with unfailing vivacity. Moreover, if his un-
derstanding was often befogged, he possessed an in-
tricate knowledge of his subject ; the French capital
had been his second home ; its life and literature had
been familiar to him from his boyhood ; he had lived
there not merely as an opulent tourist, or as a light-
hearted student in its schools of art, but as a poor
stranger writing for a living. He had, therefore,
every opportunity of expelling prejudice, and of com-
bating that hasty generalisation which is the bane of
the picturesque reporter.

Best of all, after Cambridge, he came to a Paris
quick with " movements," alert with genius and

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 45

gaiety. The victorious Romantiques were in full pos-
session of the citadel ; Hugo and Dumas were mak-
ing an easy conquest of the playhouses, while Balzac
was creating his country anew in the Com'edie Humaine.
Had he chosen, Thackeray might have read the works
of Stendhal and Michelet, of Merimee and George
Sand, of Musset and Gautier, hot from the press. It
was, too, the heyday of the grisetie, when she and her
long-haired companion danced and chatted and laughed
with a zest and extravagance unknown to our chas-
tened epoch. Fantasy and wit were in the air; a
thousand Lucien de Rubempres were entering Paris
at every gate, and dreaming their dreams of poetry
and triumph under the trees of the Luxembourg, or
listening to the tempting voice of Lousteau and his
kin beneath the shadows of its gracious palace. And
the joy of life taught Thackeray to appreciate at least
the one charm of France which cannot grow old.
" I never landed at Calais pier," says he, " without
feeling that a load of sorrow was left on the other side
the water ; " in brief, the sparkling air of France, the
sense of holiday, the feeling of a vivid intelligence
abroad, the consciousness that the people are gayer
than ourselves, that, whether right or wrong, their
thoughts are quicker and more whimsical — all this
Thackeray suggests in spite of himself.

Even when the fetes of July fill his austere soul
with contempt, he owns that the sight is brilliant,
happy, and beautiful. " If you want to see the
French people to the greatest advantage," he writes,
"you should go to a festival like this, where their

46 THACKERAY

manners and innocent gaiety show a very pleasing
contrast to the coarse and vulgar hilarity which the
same class exhibit in our own country at Epsom race-
course, for instance, or Greenwich Fair." Again, he
frankly acknowledges the delight which the French
take in comely surroundings, in the beauty of restaur-
ants, even in the proper adornment of a dirty, inodor-
ous wine-shop. He is enthusiastic when he sees a
crowd of mechanics, endimanches, gazing with intelli-
gent interest at the treasures of the Louvre ; he freely
owns that the French possess, what we do not, an ab-
stract appreciation of art. Even when he parades his
own sentimental method of criticism, he still reflects
that Paris is a paradise of painters, and that the happy
student who starves au sixieme may wander all the day
long in the resplendent palace of kings and emperors.
So far his sympathy takes him; but an inborn Philis-
tinism peeps out all the same, and he woefully mis-
reads the character of our neighbours.

He expects in the French the same political intelli-
gence which he finds in the English. He laughs
furiously at the fetes of July, because the revolution,
which they celebrate, is in his eye a failure. He
solemnly reproves the " Sancho-like gravity and
naivete " wherewith they applaud the achievements
of Louis Philippe, whom he finds a contemptible
monarch. But he forgets, in this heavy-handed re-
proof, that the Parisians are children of fancy,
changeable and whimsical ; children, too, who know
the rules of logic, and who gladly proceed from false
premisses to a logical, if a false, conclusion. For

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 47

such vagaries as these he finds no censure too severe.
The monarchy, says he, is a sham, liberty is a sham,
the people is a political sham.

So he belabours monarch and people with a strange
lack of humour and sympathy. Heine, his great con-
temporary, who was sitting in the same stalls, reading
the same newspapers, witnessing the same festivals
and processions, saw the truth with a far keener eye
than did Thackeray. He knew that the French are
comedians by nature, ready to take service under any
manager, and to do their best for him whether he be
Charles X or Louis Philippe. In their view " the
play's the thing," and politics are but a single scene
in the drama of life. Partem et circenses they love
with a constant heart, and the circus is yet more to
their mind than the bread. But Thackeray would
demand of them political wisdom as well ; he would
ask them, when they were enjoying fireworks and the
fresh air, if their enjoyment were justified by the
political situation. And they would reply, properly
enough, that a pageant needed no excuse, and that a
summer holiday was its own justification.

Even The Second Funeral of Napoleon^ Thackeray's

' T/ie Second Funeral of Napoleon was published in 1841.
Thackeray, with Monckton Milnes for companion, witnessed the
ceremony performed at the Invalides, and wrote his account post-
haste. The work, in fact, was " compiled in four days, the ballad
being added as an afterthought." The ballad — "The Chronicles
of the Drum " — is the best of its kind that Thackeray ever wrote.
The little book had a certain success. Writing to W. H. Thomp-
son in 1841, Edward FitzGerald asked : " Have you read
Thackeray's little book — the second Funeral of Napoleon ? If

48 THACKERAY

liveliest essay in reporting, might have been touched
with a lighter hand. True, nothing could have been
more ridiculous than the behaviour of the Due de
Joinville, who, at the mere rumour of war with Eng-
land, threw his comfortable furniture overboard,
turned his yacht into a man-of-war, and exacted an
oath from every man of his crew that he would die
rather than give up the bones of the dead Emperor
to the hated English. The hated English had enter-
tained the Due de Joinville with all the honours ;
they had intrusted the sacred coffin to his keeping,
having previously carried it to the sea upon their own
shoulders. But no sooner was his precious freight on
board than the Due de Joinville wished to play an-
other part — the part of the soldier who would die but
not surrender. Though an attack was out of the
question, the hero would not be foiled of his applause,
and seriously to reprove him for his folly is to mis-
understand both the hero and his temperament.
Convinced that England was greedy to reclaim what
it had freely given up, the hero armed the hand
which yesterday he had held out in friendship. Once
more the Frenchman's premisses were false and his
logic sound ; and once more Thackeray considered
the situation with excessive gravity.

He somewhere blames the English for not loving
art for art's sake, and constantly incurs his own re-
proach. His artistic sympathy, in fact, was always

not, pray do ; and buy it, and ask others to buy it : as each copy
sold puts seven and one-half pence in T.'s pocket, which is very
empty just now, I take it."

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 49

imperfect, his point of view always utilitarian or
philanthropic. His criticism of French literature,
for instance, is less intelligent even than his criticism
of French politics. He feels so little sympathy with
the drama and romance of France that he never
thinks of either apart from its subject and its moral
effect. The drama of Victor Hugo and M. Dumas
he finds " profoundly immoral and absurd " ; he
therefore prefers the drama of the common people,
which " is absurd, if you will, but good and right-
hearted." After he has seen " the most of the grand
dramas which have been produced at Paris for the
last half-dozen years," he declares that " a man may
take leave to be heartily ashamed of the manner in
which he has spent his time." By a still worse con-
fusion of ideas he deems it wrong " to enjoy a cool
supper at the Cafe Anglais " after the horrors of the
play, and thus he implicates not only the actors but
the audience in the crimes committed upon the pic-
tured scene.

It is not remarkable, therefore, that he approaches
the literature of the Romantic age without discrimina-
tion. As I have said, he might, if he would, have
read the masterpieces of Balzac, Dumas, Hugo,
Stendhal, and the rest hot from the press. Yet he
mentions none of the masters save in dispraise. In
the mellower age, which produced The Roundabout
Papers, he had learned to love the great Alexander,
but in the days of The Paris Sketch Book he shuddered
that he could not read Balzac or Dumas " without the
risk of lighting upon horrors." And whom did he

50 THACKERAY

admire ? Why, Monsieur de Bernard, to be sure,
" who is more remarkable than any other French
author for writing like a gentleman : there is ease,
grace, and ton in his style, which cannot be discovered
in Balzac, or Soulie, or Dumas." So he prefers M.
de Bernard's Gerfaut^ and, still worse, M. Reybaud's
ineffable 'Jerome Paturot^ to the masterpieces of the
Com'edie Humaine, and at last you begin to think that
he is laughing in his sleeve.

But he is not laughing at all : he is expressing the
opinion of a gentlemanly Philistine, who esteems ton
higher than truth, and who revolts against Balzac's
candid insight. Indeed, any stick is good enough for
Balzac's back, and if that eminent novelist had not
put forth a long, dull, and pompous letter in Peytel's
favour, a victim of judicial murder would assuredly
have escaped the gallows. But time has fought, with
all its weapons, against the critic. Nobody will ever
read again MM. Reybaud and de Viel-Castel. But
Honore de Balzac is immortal, as Shakespeare is im-
mortal, for he wrote the truth not only of France but
of mankind.

Yet had Thackeray's point of view not been rigidly
fixed, had he taken less note of literature and the
drama, he might have composed a just picture of
French life and thought. The permanence of some

' Jerome Paturot inspires Thackeray with the following reflec-
tion : •■ As for De Balzac, he is not fit for the salon. In point of
gentility, Dumas is about as genteel as a courier ; and Frederick
Soulie as elegant as a huissier." " These are hard words," as the
author says, and they are not ironical.

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 5 1

of his criticisms is warrant of its truth. Well as he
knew Paris, he confessed that only a partial knowl-
edge was possible. " Intimacy there is none," said
he ; " we see but the outside of the people." And
much of the outside was then, as now, hostility to
England. Thackeray himself had no illusions.
" Don't let us endeavour to disguise it — they hate us.
Not all the protestations of friendship, not all the
wisdom of Palmerston, not all the diplomacy of our
distinguished plenipotentiary, Mr. Henry Lytton
Bulwer, can make it, in our time at least, permanent
and cordial." To-day, as in Thackeray's time, " men
get a character for patriotism in France merely for
hating England," and the hatred is so old that we
need not trouble to explain it, nor to set it down to
the criminality of this party or that. Indeed, when
Thackeray discusses the ever-interesting problem of
French and English, he is both wise and fair, even if
he arrive at no conclusion. At what conclusion could
he arrive ? Our differences are emphasised by our
propinquity, and perhaps France consults her own
temper best in choosing alliances at a distance. Lit-
tle as she knows of England, she knows less of Rus-
sia, and happily mistakes her ignorance for sympathy.
But he who would understand France, must put out
of his mind all thought of his own country, and this
task Thackeray found impossible. He judged Paris
rather by her divergencies from his standard than by
qualities of her own, and even where his intelligence
was sound, his sympathy was at fault. He had the
humour to smile, but not the charity to condone.

52 THACKERAY

Yet The Paris Sketch Book was not written in vain.
Its true result may be seen in his novels ; and had he
not sojourned in France, he could not have drawn the
engaging de Florae, as true a Frenchman as ever was
portrayed by English hand.

The Paris Sketch Book was the deliberate result of a
long sojourn and many studies; its companion, The
Irish Sketch Book (1843), ^^^ composed on a different
plan. It is, in fact, a set of impressions gathered in
a single voyage, and therefore differs not at all from
what we should call to-day " special correspondence."
In 1842, when he undertook the trip, Thackeray
needed such relief as the rapidly shifting scenes of a
journey might bring. The placid course of his life
had been most rudely interrupted, and with a silent
courage that was characteristic, he sought in Ire-
land both change and " copy." At first FitzGerald
promised companionship, but his energy failed him,
and Thackeray set out alone. " There's that poor
fellow Thackeray gone off to Ireland," wrote Fitz-
Gerald ; " and what a lazy beast I am for not going
with him." But FitzGerald praised the book when
it was published, and declared that it was " all true."
And true no doubt it was, though it was a truth not
acceptable to all Irishmen.

It gives to the reader a vivid impression of some-
thing seen and noted on the spot. The writer de-
scribes with equal zest the landscape and the people ;
nothing comes amiss to his eager mind, whether it be
Irish politics or hot lobster. He is as keenly inter-
ested in the practical use of guano as in the curric-

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 53

ulum of Templemoyle School. He sentimentalises,
after his fashion, over the poverty of the Widow
Fagan. " How much goodness and generosity — how
much purity, fine feeling — nay, happiness " — says he
in one of his favourite apostrophes, " may dwell
among the poor whom we have just been looking at !
Here, thank God, is an instance of this happy and
cheerful poverty : and it is good to look, when we
can, at the heart that beats under the threadbare coat,
as well as the tattered old garment itself." Nowa-
days we take these qualities on trust ; and rightly
make no moral distinctions between rich and poor.
But the exclamatory passage just quoted is eminently
characteristic of its author, who unto the end of his
career delighted somewhat naively in the obvious
emotions.

On the other hand, the odd little chap-books, pub-
lished in Dublin, which described after their own
primitive manner the adventures of many an intrepid
horse-thief, and the tragedy of many a hard-fought
field, aroused his interest at once. Mr. James Freeny
is an excuse for one of his most agreeable essays, and
that reckless highwayman, no doubt, provided a hint
at least for Barry Lyndon. He is presented in ironical
style, without a word of excuse or reprobation, and
he pleasantly interrupts the prevailing sentiment.
Briefly, Thackeray, like many another traveller, found
Ireland a bundle of contrasts : generosity and squalor,
misery and lightheartedness, sport and rebellion, were
to his vision inextricably mixed. He frankly avowed
the difficulty of a conclusion. " To have an opinion

54 THACKERAY

about Ireland," says he, " one must begin by getting
at the truth : and where is it to be had in the country ?
Or rather there are two truths, the Catholic truth and
the Protestant truth. The two parties do not see
things with the same eyes." None the less he was
on the side of the Irish, though he never tired of
ridiculing them, and he composed an attack upon the
English government of Ireland by way of preface,
which he was persuaded to suppress. Doubtless, had
he lived to-day, he would have been a Home Ruler,
as Sir Leslie Stephen says, but his opinion shifted
with time and circumstance, and it would be idle to
define it. The Sketch Book^ however, was not the
best result of his journey to Ireland ; that must be
sought in Barry Lyndon, and the admirable Irishmen,
such as Captain Costigan, encountered in his novels.
On the other hand, it had an immediate effect : it was
the first book which gave Thackeray a definite place
in the world of letters ; it was dedicated to Lever ;
and it drew a word of congratulation from the great
Dickens himself.

His next journey was farther afield, and might in
those days (1844) have seemed almost adventurous.
The offer of a passage on board a P. & O. boat per-
suaded him to realise an ancient project, and go to the
East. Before starting he arranged to write a book of
his travels for ;^200, he took with him the half-
finished manuscript of Barry Lyndon, and let few
weeks pass without sending something to Punch.
But, despite these manifold interruptions, his real pur-
pose was the composition of his Notes of a "Journey

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 55

from Cornhill to Cairo, which, when they were pub-
lished in 1846, proved the best that their author had
yet achieved. The book is admirably picturesque in
style, and it contains passages of description which
Thackeray never excelled. For all his love of paint-
ing, literature was in his blood, and if the ateliers of
Paris had quickened his vision, the skill of putting
what he saw into words was inborn. Yet here, too,
are many traces of that sentimental Radicalism which
its author never conquered. He looks upon Athens
with a sternly practical eye, and, unmindful of its as-
sociations, merely notes that " its shabbiness beats
Ireland, and that is a strong word." Not even Cob-
den himself surpassed that contemptuous summary,
and it is characteristic of Thackeray's invincible
optimism. In his eyes there was no time like the
present, and a contemplation of Rhodes made him
ask, " When shall we have a real account of these
times and heroes — no good-natured pageant, like
those of the Scott romances, but a real authentic
story, to instruct and frighten honest people of the
present day, and make them thankful that the grocer
governs the world now in place of the baron ? "

So he congratulates himself that he learned no
Greek at school ; so he swears he would prefer two
hundred a-year in Fleet Street to the kingdom of the
Greeks ; so he echoes the common gag that Byron
did not write from his heart. And then, the more
profoundly to overwhelm you with regret, he will
sketch you a sunny landscape, in which " every fig-
tree is gilded and bright, as if it were an Hesperian

56 THACKERAY

orchard," or he will recall a boyish memory of The
Arabian Nights, and he will do all this with so fine a
spirit, that you wonder how the shadow oi sentiment
and reform ever fell across his buoyant, pleasure-lov-
ing nature. But he gives the explanation himself:
Smyrna, says he, " rebuked all mutinous Cockneys
into silence." A mutinous Cockney — that is what
he was in one aspect, and his mutinous Cockneyism
made him as blind to the elegant triviality of life as to
Athens and its splendid memories.

But mutinous Cockney though he was on occa-
sion, he possessed one gift, too rarely used, which
should have corrected his error — the gift of irony.
On his way to the East he finished with much tribu-
lation his first complete essay in the art of fiction —
The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a piece of ironic presenta-
tion, which has not since been surpassed. He had
already tried his hand at irony and with ill-success,
for Catherine is but irony touched by a sentimental
regret ; and though he never relinquished this method
of satire, in his later novels it is so thick overlaid with
pathos as to be hardly recognisable. But in Barry
Lyndon the irony is sustained with a consistency rare
in Thackeray, who found in Jonathan Wild the best
model, and wrote in frank competition with his
master.

Now, irony is neither popular nor easily understood.
It is commonly supposed to be the easy trick of writ-
ing good when you mean bad. Johnson could find no
better instance of it for his dictionary than " Boling-
broke was a holy man," and he showed for once that

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 57

his hatred for a great statesman was stronger than his
love of truth. The author of The Courtier was far
more wisely inspired, and explains what he rightly
calls " a handsome kind of raillery " with perfect
lucidity and the happiest examples. " There is like-
wise a handsome kind of raillery," says he, " which
consists in a certain dissimulation, when we speak one
thing and mean another : I don't say the quite con-
trary, as if we were to call a dwarf giant or a negro
white, or a very ugly a very beautiful person, because
the contrariety is too manifest, but when in a grave
and serious tone we express that to which inwardly
we express no regard or assent."

The ingenious Castiglione guards his definition,
which Johnson does not, and of course Castiglione is
in the right of it. For irony is something far subtler
than an interchange of opposites : it is a delicate
masking of the truth, a method of presenting a fact
with the greater force, because you set it upside down.
But the figure has been so variously employed that it
is wiser to give instances than to attempt a definition,
and it will be seen that, by whomsoever affected, its
essence is a hinted concealment of the truth. It is
the ignorance of CEdipus the king, for instance,
which touches the masterpiece of Sophocles with
irony. The audience knows, as the king does not,
that CEdipus' determination to discover the criminal
who pollutes the State will recoil upon himself, and
there is not a line of his utterance that is not double-
edged. That is to say, the poet takes his public into
a confidence from which his characters are excluded.

58 THACKERAY

The Socratic irony, on the other hand, is a lacic of
knowledge assumed by the omniscient, the more easily
to entrap his opponents ; and though it differs from
the irony of Sophocles, it is true to the essential op-
position of word and sense.

Yet the spirit as well as the word must be opposed
to the sense if irony is to achieve its purpose. When
Voltaire insists in the face of unparalleled disaster
that all is for the best in the best of all possible
worlds, he is preaching a sermon against the folly of
optimism, and this he achieves not by a mere trans-
position of opposite words, but by changing the whole
spirit of his romance. When Fielding set out to
write The History of "Jonathan Wild the Great — the
masterpiece which profoundly influenced Thackeray —
he neither sang a paean to thievery, nor sought to
demonstrate the sacredness of property. He merely
drew the portrait of a " great " man, and let vice and
virtue change places. After the same fashion, Thack-
eray let his hero, as arrant a scamp as ever cheated
at cards or showed the white feather, tell his story in
his own terms ; and so fine a colour does Barry put
upon the meanest of his actions, that while the reader
detects his villainy in every line, he himself preserves
a splendid unconsciousness. It is true, as we shall
presently see, that the irony is false in many details,
that the sentiment of every-day life is frequently and
inappositely heard. But the blemishes of Barry Lyn-
don are not essential like the blemishes of Catherine^
whose meaning is confused throughout by the inter-
vention of the author's disapproval. The reader and

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 59

the narrator — Barry in his own person — preserve each
his own point of view, and the hero only speaks with
the voice of commonplace conviction, when the
author nods. Thus, for the most part, the terms of
life's equation are changed, and the equation is solved
in accordance with the rules of an imaginary algebra.
In other words, Thackeray recognised that the lan-
guage of irony is a language apart, in which thought,
to be understood, must be freely and consistently
translated ; and though that kind of humour, which
was the clear expression of his temperament, flashes
intermittently in all his works, it burns nowhere else
with so steady a flame as in Barry Lyndon.

Barry Lyndon was for the moment a palpable failure ;
it passed unnoticed through Eraser's Magazine in
1844, and its author never found it worth while to
print it as a book. America, with a better judgment,
pirated it in 1852, and it made a tardy appearance on
our side the Atlantic in a posthumous edition. But
the generation which delighted in the sentimental
scandals of Harrison Ainsworth would have nothing
to say to Barry Lyndon., a rascal drawn with spirit,
and touched with a rarely failing irony. The mean-
ing was not obvious ; therefore the book was despised
by the people. Why should we care about a criminal
whom we would not ask to dinner ? That is the
criticism commonly deemed adequate for Barry Lyn-
don, and it is not worth while to insist upon its ab-
surdity. The most primitive reader should see that
here is n-o question of right or wrong; that an appeal
is made not to the moral sense but to the intellect;

6o THACKERAY

and that he who condemns Barry Lyndon on a false
ground, shows that he has misunderstood it. How-
ever, Thackeray was doubtless neither disturbed nor
surprised at the reception of his work, for he, too,
must have realised that irony is the boomerang of
literature, which invariably returns home upon him
who wields it.

In Barry Lyndon, then, Thackeray has sketched
with incomparable spirit and agility the career of a
braggart Irishman, a rascal who deserts from the
army, who habitually cheats at cards, who blackmails
men, and who bullies women. Of course it is part
of the game that the hero should not recognise the
semblance of a crime in his own chequered career,
and a splendid satisfaction gives a zest to his lightest
actions. His family (in his eyes) is " the noblest of
the island, and perhaps of the universal world " ; he
would assume the Irish crown over his coat-of-arms,
" but that there are so many silly pretenders to that
distinction, and render it common." The pretenders,
however, were not always a check upon his pride,
and when after his marriage he set out to visit his
estates in Devonshire, the Irish crown and the ancient
coat of the Barrys were painted on the panels of his
chariots " beside the Countess's coronet and the noble
cognisance of the noble family of Lyndon." At the
outset of his career Barry, like many another hero,
met neither success nor appreciation. The stage
upon which he was asked to play was far too small
for his genius, and to do him justice, he soon left
the humble cottage of his mother — Barryville it was

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 6 1

called, with a proper magnificence — for the larger
world of adventure and chicanery. So, in the proper
spirit of the eighteenth century he is sent riding across
Ireland, on whose highroad he encounters not only
the celebrated one-eyed Captain Freeny, but the fair
lady in distress, the false companion of every true
knight.

Forced to enlist by fear of an iniquitous law, he
changes clothes with a milksop officer, and proudly
deserts his colours ; but once again — the last time for
many years — good fortune deserts him, and he is
kidnapped by a beggarly German and forced to be-
come a private in Billow's regiment. To this epoch
in his life he always looked back with pardonable dis-
pleasure. Like a true aristocrat, he "never had a
taste for anything but genteel company, and hated all
descriptions of low life." How, then, could he tol-
erate the squalor and discomfort which necessarily
disgraced the kidnapped private in a regiment of ruf-
fians ? Of course he made the best of a miserable
position. He kept inviolate that pride of birth which
never deserted him, and he did not soil his hands with
vulgar toil. When the stress of war was relaxed,
" many of our men," says he, "got leave to work in
trades ; but I had been brought up to none : and be-
sides, my honour forbade me." But, at least, he
could serve Captain van PotzdorfF as confidential
servant without putting a blot upon the scutcheon of
the Irish kings ; and when once he was promoted to
be a spy, his self-respect was assured. At this time
he was animated by a kind of optimism, which was

62 THACKERAY

hardly worthy so great a man. " My maxim is to
bear all," he wrote, "to put up with water if you can-
not get burgundy, and if you have no velvet to be
content with frieze. But burgundy and velvet are
the best, bien entendu, and the man is a fool if he will
not secure the best when the scramble is open." The
real Barry speaks in the last sentence ; the shallow
optimism which would put up with water in any case
was the mere boast of youth.

Set by a lucky accident to spy upon his gifted un-
cle, le Chevalier de Balibari, the hero at last found the
career best suited to his genius. Henceforth the faro
table supplied his extravagant wants ; henceforth un-
cle and nephew took that place in the world for which
their skill and their graces eminently fitted them.
Nor could they have found a better arena for their
deeds of daring than the Duchy of X., for the Duchy
was not a Tom Tiddler's ground where any fool could
pick up gold. Gold there was to be had ; but skill
and resolution were necessary to its acquisition.
" None but men of courage and genius," says Barry
with pardonable pride, " could live and prosper in a
society where every one was bold and clever; and
here my uncle and I held our own — ay, and more
than our own." The luck of the tables may change
for a night, but persistence is the secret of success ;
and the two Irishmen won not only wealth but influ-
ence as well, by the subtle acceptance of promissory
notes.

Meanwhile the ingenious Barry was busy with
another project, " I had determined," he says, " as

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 63

is proper with gentlemen (it is only your low people
who marry for mere affection), to consolidate my for-
tunes by marriage." And perhaps his uncle's brain
never conceived a bolder scheme than Barry's mar-
riage with the Countess Ida. That it came to naught,
and was followed by the tragic murder of a princess,
was not their fault.^ They knew not the spies that
were arrayed against them ; they did not fathom the
villainy of the police-minister, nor the ultimate cow-
ardice of Magny, the victim through whose embar-
rassment their triumph was to come. But fail they
did, and failure drove them once more to be wander-
ers upon the face of Europe, wanderers with a sound
knowledge of life and a devout worship of the goddess
Opportunity.

The second adventure of " the Tipperary Alci-
biades," as Sir Charles Lyndon ^ insolently called the
ingenious Barry, was more successful. On the death
of that baronet, Barry forced the wealthiest widow in
the three kingdoms to marry him, and thus attained
the climax of his life. The rest of the narrative is
but a record of decay : how he squandered the lady's
fortune, how he lost his son, the young Viscount of
Castle Lyndon, how, sunk in debt, he was put away

' Thackeray, as Mrs. Ritchie tells us, took the episode of Duke
Victor and his Duchess from a book entitled L' Empire, cm dix arts
sous Napoleon, par un Chambellan : Paris, 1836. In this book the
story is told of the first king of Wurtemberg, who killed his wife
for adultery.

' Sir Charles Lyndon is drawn after Charles Hanbury Williams,
a great wit in a witty age, a diplomatist and man of the world,
whose fate was hapless as Lyndon's own.

64 THACKERAY

into the Fleet Prison, where his aged mother soothed
his declining years — all this is the natural Nemesis of
superb fortune. But while he was at his best he
challenges Jonathan Wild himself, and his theory of
greatness would not have shamed the great thief-
catcher himself.

Aided, no doubt, by the wit and intelligence of his
uncle, he formulated his views in what may be termed
a philosophy of conduct. He saw very early in. his
journey through the world that no man can be great
who is not boastful. " I own," said he, " that I am
disposed to brag of my birth and other acquirements ;
for I have always found that if a man does not give
himself a good word his friends will not do it for
him," and truly Barry Lyndon never conceals his
worth under a cloak of modesty. Without ceasing he
praises his courage, his beauty, his strength, his equal
skill with cards or sword, and the splendour of his
equipages. When he is in good luck, his story is a
paean of praise to his own prowess. And if we may
believe him, the fair sex outdid the hero himself in
admiration. It was his agreeable way to make love
to all women, " of whatever age or degree of beauty,"
and who was there in Europe to resist his fascination .?
" I need not mention my successes among the fairer
portion of the creation," said he, in a passage which
his creator has freely adapted from the Memoires of
Casanova. " One of the most accomplished, the tall-
est, the most athletic, and the handsomest gentleman
of Europe as I was then, a young fellow of my figure
could not fail of having advantages, which a person

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 65

of my spirit knew very well how to use. But upon
these subjects I am dumb. Charming SchuvalofF, black-
eyed Sczotarska, dark Valdez, tender Hegenheim, bril-
liant Langeac ! — ye gentle hearts that knew how to beat
in old times for the warm young Irish gentleman, where
are ye now ? . . . Oh ! to see the Valdez once
more, as on that day I met her first driving in state
with her eight mules and her retinue of gentlemen by
the side of yellow Man^anares ! Oh, for another
drive with Hegenheim in the gilded sledge over the
Saxon snow ! False as SchuvalofF was, 'twas better
to be jilted by her than to be adored by any other
woman. I can't think of any one of them without
tenderness. I have ringlets of all their hair in my
poor little museum of recollections."

So he treated them with the savagery that became a
man while he was with them, and when they were
vanished, he treasured the trinkets of their love with
a sensibility that the Chevalier de Seingalt himself, the
Irishman's great exemplar, might have envied. But
love after all was an interlude (or a series of inter-
ludes) in a chevaleresque, industrious career. The real
business of Barry's life, as of Casanova's, was gam-
bling, and he was far too noble to cast a slur on the
brilliant pursuit to which he owed his greatness. In
truth, his rhapsody on gaming does equal honour to
his head and his heart. He was not the man to make
excuses, or to cry pardon where no pardon was sought.
When he composed his celebrated defence of play he
was speaking of the good old times before " the cow-
ardice of the French aristocracy," to use his own ex-

66 THACKERAY

pression, " brought ruin and discredit upon our order."
With a justified indignation he declares that "they
cry fie now upon men engaged in play ; but I should
like to know how much more honourable their modes
of livelihood are than ours. The broker of the Ex-
change, who bulls and bears, and buys and sells, and
dabbles with lying loans, and trades on State secrets,
what is he but a gamester ? The merchant who deals
in teas and tallow, is he any better.? His bales of
dirty indigo are his dice, his cards come up every year
instead of every ten minutes, and the see is his green
table. ... I say that play was an institution of
chivalry : it has been wrecked along with other priv-
ileges of men of birth. When Seingalt engaged a
man for six-and-thirty hours ^ without leaving the
table, do you think he showed no courage ? . . .
When, at Toeplitz, the Duke of Courland brought
fourteen lacqueys, each with four bags of florins, and
challenged our bank to play against the sealed bags,
what did we ask ? ' Sir,' said we, ' we have but
eighty thousand florins in the bank, or two hundred
thousand at three months. If your Highness's bags
do not contain more than eighty thousand, we will
meet you.' And we did, and after eleven hours' play,
in which our bank was at one time reduced to two
hundred and three ducats, we won seventeen thousand
florins of him. Is this not something like boldness ?
does this profession not require skill, and perseverance,
and bravery ? Four crowned heads looked on at the

' Casanova de Seingalt played for forty-two hours without a
break, if one may believe his own story.

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 67

game, and an Imperial princess, when I turned up the
ace of hearts and made Paroli, burst into tears. No
man on the European continent held a higher position
than Redmond Barry then, and when the Duke of
Courland lost he was pleased to say that we had won
nobly ; and so we had, and spent nobly what we
won."

Nor must it be supposed that Barry advocated the/
employment of foul means. He had a theoretic con-
tempt for all common practices. " It is only the
clumsy fool who cheats" he said — " who resorts to
the vulgar expedients of cogged dice and cut cards.
Play grandly, honourably," this was his exhortation.
" Be not cast down at losing ; but, above all, be not
eager at winning, as mean souls are." Such was
Barry Lyndon's philosophy, and what gamester ever
formulated a better one ? So good is it, that it is
Casanova's own ; and when Barry, a confirmed cheat,
condemns cheating, he is but anticipating that hero's
famous method of " correcting " fortune. But great
as Barry was, his uncle, the Chevalier, had elements
of grandeur which the nephew could not comprehend.
In style and intellect he was incomparably the superior.
He, in fact, was the gamester doubled by the diplo-
matist — be-starred and be-ribboned as only the servants
of courts are be-ribboned and be-starred. Even in
gaming mere profit was not his sole end, and he never
forgot that true grandeur lies also in method. This
the nephew, eager for wealth, could not wholly appre-
ciate. " My uncle," said he, " (I speak with great
respect of him) was too much of a devotee, and too

68 THACKERAY

much of a martinet at play, ever to win greatly y" and
forthwith he chid him for lack of daring, but he does
not see that his uncle's dignity and worldly wisdom
were worth more to them than many a stolen coup.
So the Chevalier finished his career as he began it,
torn between beauty and the Church. Now a mon-
astery claims him, now he succumbs to the fascinations
of a ballet-dancer. But in all things he is discreet
and a gentleman, nor could Thackeray have devised a
more suitable refuge for his declining years than the
Irish College, which lies apart under the shadow of
the Pantheon, and which fitted his demure dignity
as justly as Barry's roystering spirit was punished by
the Fleet.

In Barry Lyndon Thackeray found a task which
suited his talent ; and being happy in his task, he per-
formed it with a spirit and success which he did not
often surpass. For Barry is his best experiment in
irony, sustained for the most part with a proper sense
of his model and his intention. But it would not
have been written by Thackeray, if it had not lapsed
now and again from its lofty ideal. The author can-
not completely exclude himself and his opinions from
the drama. The sentimentalist, whom we know so
well, is often looking over the shoulder of the ironist,
and interrupting the conduct of the story with com-
ment or apology. When Barry drops a tear of sym-
pathy over the misery of his mother, we know that he
merely echoes the author of his being. Such a son as
Barry showed himself would be indifferent whether
his mother starved or not ; and when he tells you that

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 69

" many a time the poor soul left him to go and break
her heart in her own room alone," he alienates your
sympathy without winning your belief. That is a
specimen of false pathos. On the other hand, the
emotion which he betrays on meeting his uncle for
the first time is natural and sincere. The old ruffian
with his apricot-coloured velvet and his noble man-
ners, appeared irresistible. As Barry declared, " he
burst into tears " — why he knew not ; yet the tears
are easily explained : he had met one of his own kin
splendidly apparelled, and he knew that his fortune
was made. But at other times we find this notable
swashbuckler babbling of flowers, or recalling his in-
fancy with a sigh, and we can only regard those back-
slidings into sensibility as a serious blemish.

The blemish is the more surprising, because Thack-
eray derived his portrait of Barry from the best sources,
and painted it after the best model. As I have said,
from beginning to end he kept his eye upon 'Jonathan
Wild, and he could not have found abetter inspiration ;
while the eighteenth century, that golden age of beaus
and bucks, supplied him with abundant material. The
true original of Barry was, no doubt, Andrew Robin-
son Stoney, bully and fortune-hunter, and my Lady
Lyndon is a very fair presentment of the Countess of
Strathmore, the daughter and heiress of George Bowes.
Stoney, of course, had a more brilliant career than the
hero of Thackeray's romance, for not only did he
marry and ill-treat Miss Newton, a fortune of .^30,-
000 ; but after her death he brought off the grand
coup, and captured the wealthiest blue-stocking of her

70 THACKERAY

time. The Countess, again, outshone, if she re-
sembled, Lady Lyndon : she, too, dipped her finger in
the ink-pot, she wrote Confessions^ she patronised men
of learning and talent, and during her widowhood her
house was "fairly denominated a Temple of Folly."
She, too, had watched the death of one husband with-
out breaking her heart, and met more than her match
at a second venture. As for Stoney, who, after mar-
riage, assumed the name of Bowes, he lacked (says his
biographer) both moral principle and physical courage,
and Barry hung not an inch b ehind him. A chap-
book describes the marriage in terms which fit Barry
and his spouse to a hair. " Here then were joined in
holy wedlock," to quote the popular account, " two
such as for the honour of nature are seldom to be seen.
The one had broken the heart of a former wife, the
other had not lengthened the days of a former hus-
band ; in a battle royal of a main of cocks, the two sur-
viving ones contend for existence, and thus are these
two pitted as if by positive destruction."

Even in the smallest details the similarity of truth
and fiction is evident : the young Lord Glamis, for
instance, like Viscount Bullingdon, fled from his
brutal stepfather, and came back after many years to
claim his inheritance. But while Stoney Bowes sat
for the portrait, there are others who suggested a

' TAf Confessions of the Countess of Strathjnore (1793), wrung
from her by her brutal husband, are a document which it would be
difficult to match in the records of the world. They prove con-
clusively that Stoney surpassed Barry himself in cowardice and
cynicism.

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 7 1

touch here or there. It has been said that Casanova
was for something in the picture, and though it is
certain that Thackeray borrowed much from the in-
comparable Memoires^ especially from the scenes at
the green table, little of the Chevalier de Seingalt's
true character is revealed in the vulgar braggart that
was Barry Lyndon. For Casanova, despite his faults,
was a man of intelligence and knowledge. The
Prince de Ligne, who wrote with authority, gave him
credit for delicacy and honour; he was so deeply
tinctured with learning that he bored his friends with
quotations from Homer and Horace ; he was always
grateful, unless his pride were hurt ; and his char-
acter, complex and disconcerting, remains a puzzle
of biography. In any case, he is plainly remote from
Barry Lyndon, whom he could have met nowhere
else than over the cards.

Tiger Roche,* on the other hand, gave Thackeray
many a useful hint, and not even Barry could outdo
this Irishman in blackguardly conduct. For not only
had the Tiger, an artist in profitable matrimony,
robbed several unsuspecting ladies of their fortunes ;
he had bullied and beaten men all the world over.
He won his name in America, where, being charged
with robbery by an officer who declined to meet him,
he sprang at him like a "tiger," and "tore away a
mouthful of flesh," which he declared was " the
sweetest morsel he had ever tasted." But he most

' An account of Tiger Roche is printed in Ireland Sixty Years
Since, and he is the hero of several chap-books which Thackeray
may have picked up during his journey in Ireland.

72 THACKERAY

closely resembles Barry Lyndon in his sudden
alternations of courage and cowardice. At one mo-
ment brave as a tiger, at another he skulked like a
whipped cur ; and Thackeray has used one passage
in his life to excellent purpose. It will be remem-
bered that when Barry Lyndon lay in the Fleet Prison,
his pluck deserted him. A small man was " always
jeering him, and making game of him," and when he
asked him to fight, Barry hadn't the courage. This
episode is frankly borrowed from the life of Tiger
Roche, whose spirit so pitifully broke down in the
Fleet that he submitted to any insult. " On one
occasion," says his biographer, " he had a trifling dis-
pute with a fellow-prisoner, who kicked him, and
struck him a blow in the face. There was a time
when his fiery spirit would not have been satisfied but
with the blood of the offender. He now only turned
aside and cried like a child. It happened that his
countryman. Buck English, seizing a stick, flogged
him in a savage manner : Roche made no attempt to
retaliate or resist, but crouched under the punish-
ment." Yet no sooner was he out of prison than his
spirit and bravery returned ; he cheerfully faced the
point of the stoutest antagonist ; and then once more
he showed the white feather, and pitifully quailed be-
fore the insult of a bully. In picturesqueness Roche
has the advantage, but it is plain to see what he con-
tributed to the making of Barry Lyndon, who, how-
ever, is none the worse as a portrait because more
than one rufSan sat for it.

In the early 'Forties sentiment was stronger than

THE PICTURESQUE REPORTER 73

intelligence. The story, which should have made
Thackeray famous, passed unnoticed through a
magazine. Not even the admirable episode of the
German Duchy, sketched with a technical mastery
and a knowledge of life which Thackeray seldom
surpassed, availed to find him readers. But mean-
time journalism was giving him the reputation that
literature could not give, and, like many another man
of letters, he was being loudly acclaimed for work
unworthy his talent.

CHAPTER IV

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR

Writing to Frederick Tennyson in 1842, Edward
FitzGerald, a Cassandra of criticism, said : " Tell
Thackeray not to go to Punch yet." Artistically the
advice was sound. A comic paper, were it possible,
would be like a dinner of sauces, such as an accom-
plished cook would not consent to prepare. No man
can be funny either to order or at all times, and wit
is so precious a gift that it should flash upon us un-
expectedly. Punch, moreover, was already pontifical,
though but a year old. It had already taken its
place among British institutions, and despite its pro-
fession of wit and humour, it was (and is) portentously
serious. The mahogany-tree became sacred as soon
as it was carved, and it is not surprising to any one
who turns over its pages that its jubilee was celebrated
by a religious service. But to Thackeray it was not
so much a field for artistic expression as a means of
livelihood. For some ten years he served it loyally,
and contributed to its columns a vast deal of work-
manlike journalism. There the matter might have
ended; a few memorable pages might have been
rescued from oblivion, and the rest buried, as journal-
ism should always be buried, in the columns where
first it saw the light.
74

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 75

But the demon of curiosity pursued Thackeray
from Fraser's to Punchy so that it is our own fault if we
do not know every line and scratch which he sent to
our only comic paper. The archaeologist has devoted
infinite research to the discovery of the unimportant.
He has told us how many " cartoons " were the fruit
of Thackeray's suggestion, how many "social cuts "
Thackeray's ingenuity designed. He has traced, with
indisputable authority, the hand of Thackeray through
many a weary volume. He tells us how often his
victim calls himself " Muff," how often he prefers to
be known as " Spec." Not a paragraph escapes him,
and while his energy is laudable, it is less than fair
to the novelist's memory. A writer is not at his best
in a note written with the printer's devil at the door,
and his personal view is very soon merged in the
general policy of a journal.

It is not, therefore, in his casual contributions to
Punch that we may hope to surprise the real Thack-
eray. We may marvel at the versatility of Interest
which enabled him to turn from France to Ireland,
from foolscap to the drawing-block. But if he alone
wielded both pen and pencil, his colleagues rivalled
him in the variety of subjects which they were ready
to treat at a moment's notice. In politics he reveals
himself a thorough-paced Liberal, a Home Ruler, at
first from conviction, and presently because he " loved
a quiet life," an admirer of Cobden, and, as became
the author of The Book of Snobs, a contemner of courts
and their parasites. Most of the windmills at which
he tilted long since lost their sails. To-day nobody

yb THACKERAY

cares about Jenkins, under which name Thaciceray
guyed Foster of The Morning Post, or the Poet Bunn,
or James Silk Buckingham. And after these the
common objects of his scorn were Prince Albert and
his hat, Joinville and the French ; but when they
were ridiculed by others he felt a resentment, which
was partly justified, for, however strongly he felt, his
hand was never so heavy as Douglas Jerrold's.

The most of his contributions to Punch, then, are
the merest journey-work. The Legend of 'Jawhrahim
Heraudee, wherewith he made his debut in 1842, is no
better than Miss Tickletohy's Lectures upon English
History, a desperate attempt to be funny, which was
discouraged by the editor. The Fat Contributor is
just as little to one's mind, and it was not until
Thackeray resuscitated his old friend Jeames that he
did himself justice. The hunt for railway shares
gave the incomparable de la Pluche an admirable
chance to express his views upon finance and society;
but it was with The Book of Snobs that Thackeray first
found a new talent and hit the public taste. The
time of its appearance was propitious. In 1846 the
wave of revolution which broke over Europe two
years later was already gathering force and volume.
Democracy, if not fashionable, was popular. There
were thousands of Britons eager to see the follies and
vulgarities of the great world exposed ; and they took
the same delight in The Book of Snobs as our demo-
crats of to-day take in the gossip of " society "
papers. Old as the vice is now, it was not new in
1846 ; but Thackeray stamped it with an official

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 77

name, which, like the quality it denotes, is im-
perishable.'

The origin of the word is lost in obscurity. It
was not Thackeray's own invention ; indeed it is not
uncommonly found in the works of Dickens, Lever,
and others -, nor was it always used in its familiar
sense. In the Cambridge of the early nineteenth
century it was a contemptuous term put upon the
townsmen by the members of the university ; and
since it makes its first appearance in the Gradus ad
Cantahrigiam of 1824,^ being absent from the earlier
edition (1803), its introduction may be approximately
fixed. Thackeray, the undergraduate, knew the name
well, since it was borne by the little journal for which
he wrote at Cambridge ; but there is all the difference
in the world between a " townsman " as opposed to a

' Snobbishness is doubtless as old as the world, and you may
track it in any period you will. In 1802, says The Times, " a
scandalous intrusion was practised by persons employed by some
of the morning papers, to take down the names of persons of
fashion as they got out of their carriages to visit their friends."
One of these gentry, surprised in the servants' hall of the DileL
tante Theatre, in Tottenham Street, was, we are told, " sent to the
watch-house." To-day he would be far more kindly treated, and
he (or she) would assuredly drive to the theatre in a brougham.
But so far has snobbishness been carried in our day, that the press
shows a naive surprise if august personages can speak or walk.
Not long since it was gravely asserted that a certain princess, hav-
ing made a small purchase in a shop, defrayed the cost out of her
own purse. Out of whose purse, save her own, should she have
defrayed it ?

5 " Snob. A term applied indiscriminately to all who have not
the honour of being members of the University."

78 THACKERAY

" gownsman " and the superfine gentry of The Book
of Snobs. Probably the general sense, which still sur-
vives, is also the older, the narrowed use of the word
at Cambridge being a mere piece of local exclusive-
ness. At any rate, De Quincey employs the word to
the same purpose as Thackeray in 1822,^ which proves
that it belonged not to a university, but to the world.
But certainty is impossible, nor does Thackeray help
us to pierce the mystery. " Not above five-and-
twenty years since," he writes, " a name, an express-
ive monosyllable, arose to designate the race."
Maybe he is thinking of De Quincey, maybe of his
own undergraduate journal. The effect in either case
is the same : he leaves us with a word which the
philologists cannot explain, and which the hardiest
lexicographer would hesitate to define.^

So much for the word ; now for the quality. " We
cannot say what it is," wrote Thackeray, " any more
than we can define wit, or humour, or humbug ; but
we know what it is." Nevertheless he attempted a
definition himself, which does not enlighten us.
" He who meanly admires mean things is a snob — per-
haps that is a safe definition of the character." If it

' See The Opium-Eater (edition 1862, p. 120) : " Those base
snobs who would put up with a vile Brummagem substitute.'" For
this quotation I am indebted to the courtesy of Dr. J. A. H.
Murray.

2 The last step in the word's development is the strangest of all.
The French took hold of it, and not knowing its meaning, bent it
to their will, so that in the Paris of to-day it means the top of the
fashion, and the word has acquired a sense precisely opposite to
that which it connoted in the Gradus ad Cantabrigiatn of 1824.

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 79

were, then The Book of Snobs need not have been
written, for a single page would be sufBcient to con-
vince the most hardened sinner. Nor does Thackeray
live up to his definition through a single page. The
things which the most of his snobs admire are not
mean, unless rank, intelligence, and achievement are
all mean. But the truth is, Thackeray had " an eye
for a snob " ; he tracked Snobs through history, " as
certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles."
Wherever there was a man, he saw a snob; if the
man were of high rank, he overvalued himself; if he
were of low rank, he overvalued others. Lady Bare-
acres is a snob, because she spends more than she can
afford ; Lady Scraper is a snob, because she prefers a
mutton-chop eaten in splendour to a whole saddle
consumed in Brixton ; Sir Walter Raleigh was a
snob, because, being a loyal courtier, he spread his
cloak before the feet of his sovereign.

But from beginning to end Thackeray's bias is evi-
dent. He inclines so far to the side of the people
that he blames the kings of this world for the adula-
tion heaped upon them by fools. If sovereignty be
anything better than a disgrace, then Louis XIV was
a great king, since no man ever so well understood
the pageantry of a throne. Yet to Thackeray " old
squaretoes " was a snob, who depended wholly upon
his wig. He considers the army with the same prej-
udiced eye, and writes like a war-correspondent lately
returned from the front : the red-jackets are " great-
whiskered warriors, who have faced all dangers of
climate and battle " j the officers who perform " the

8o THACKERAY

idiotic services " of command are " vacuous, good-
natured, gentlemanlike, rickety little lieutenants."
Rag and Famish, again, are in no sense snobs ; cads
they may be; but to include such rafFs as these and
Lord Byron in one category, is to confuse not merely
words but qualities.

At the university he is no more happy than in the
army. He is indignant because in his day noblemen
were granted degrees upon easy terms. But here was
no snobbishness ; it was merely part of an ancient
system, which could be attacked, and has been abol-
ished, on its merits. The sizar at Cambridge, the
servitor at Oxford, suffered an evident hardship ; yet
let it be remembered that philanthropy, not snobbish-
ness, was the first cause of their position, and that
similar hardships will be inevitable until we are all
equally rich, or equally poor, by Act of Parliament.
And then, as if to show the insecurity of his argu-
ment, he condemns Crump, the Master of Saint
Boniface, for whom, no doubt, we may read Whe-
well, because " he being a beggar, has managed to get
upon horseback." Would he have kept him, we
wonder, at an eternal charity school, or would he
have forced him to carry to the Master's Lodge an
air of affected humility ? It is, indeed, a touch of
true snobbishness to twit the successful scholar with
his humble origin, and Thackeray's argument is
marred by a manifest contradiction. He who at-
tempts to rise is a snob ; he who deigns to descend is
a snob ; and if equality is our only salvation, it is by
the author's reasoning plainly unattainable.

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 8 1

With much of Thackeray's satire it is easy to
sympathise. All honest men hate tuft-hunting as
they hate an assumption of gentility. We none of
us can find words strong enough to condemn the
" Court Circular," which, while it treats the exalted in
rank as superhuman, invites the lower middle class to
spatter their familiar conversation with great names.
But Thackeray does not stay his hand at legitimate
denunciation. He worries his point, until he himself
becomes the mouthpiece of mean thoughts. He
seems to be haunted by a species of self-conscious-
ness ; he is surprised that he is where he is ; he
knows that somebody is above or below him ; but he
cannot take his place in the world (or anybody else's
place) for granted. He quite rightly holds a society
" which sets up to be polite, and ignores Arts and
Letters, to be a snobbish Society." But Arts and
Letters have always got the recognition they desire
from a Society which, by Thackeray's own argument,
has no right to encourage them.

In truth, there is a touch of wounded pride in
every page of this Book of Snobs, which Thackeray
should never have betrayed. At the very time at
which he was scarifying the Snob, he was dining
where he could, and moving with a proper pleasure
" in the inner circle." A year later he takes a genu-
ine and justified delight in riding with dukes and
duchesses at Spa. Like all other men, he preferred
good company to bad, and who would blame him ^.
Yet he cannot view the situation with a simple eye.
When the young Disraeli fluttered into the highest

82 THACKERAY

society he professed a frank joy in his success.
When he dined at a distinguished peer's, " the only
commoner in the room," he was conscious of a tri-
umph, and a man of sense must surely confess
Disraeli's attitude at once more honest and more dig-
nified. How, then, shall we harmonise Thackeray's
practice and theory ? It would be hard, indeed, had
not Sir Leslie Stephen given us the key. " Thack-
eray was at this time," says Sir Leslie, " an inhabitant
of Bohemia, and enjoyed the humours and unconven-
tional ways of the region. But he was a native of
his own Tyburnia, forced into Bohemia by distress,
and there meeting many men of the Bludyer type
who were his inferiors in refinement and cultivation."
Truly, there is no easier method of falsifying facts
than to live with one's inferiors. No doubt Thack-
eray seemed a snob to the Bohemians of his acquaint-
ance, who resented his superiority with a jealous
rage ; no doubt, also, it was in Bohemia that he saw
the folly of pretence, and learned to exaggerate in his
mind's eye the outward shows of life.

But it was not merely his environment which con-
fused his vision. The Snob Papers betray a lack of
humour, an inability to look at things in their right
proportion, which it is not easy to condone. Thack-
eray was persuaded that all things are barbarous which
are not of practical utility. He agreed with Cobden,
he said, that Courts are barbarous, that " beef-eaters
are barbarous." He hated tradition, and denounced-
in set terms "the brutal, unchristian, blundering
Feudal system." But to denounce is not to abolish.

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 83

As we are born of the past, so we cannot, by a mere
act of will, rid ourselves of our ancestry and its in-
fluence. The Feudal system may be all that a hostile
fancy paints it, but it shaped the world we live in, the
only world we shall ever live in. Nor would Thack-
eray's argument be sound, unless he re-created the
human race, and let it fight out its battles in vacuo.

But there is another reason why Thackeray was
prone to detect his favourite vices in everybody, — he
was strangely interested in the trivialities of life.
The philosopher who could not endure the " bounce"
of Dumas nor the brutality of M. de Balzac, liked to
reflect that Major Ponto's hollands was gin, that
Sackville Maine was ruined at the " Sarcophagus,"
that Timmins' dinner was not yet paid for. True,
these lesser evils are part of the tragedy of life, but
they are not all its tragedy ; and it is Thackeray's
weakness sometimes to have mistaken the part for the
whole. Once taken hold of by this dominant idea,
he could not shake ofF the obsession ; he continued
until the end believing that every man he met was a
snob, and forgot that if snobbishness be the common
factor of humanity, it would be aS well to strike it
out and make an end of it.

But if The Book of Snobs is based upon a confusion
of thought, it none the less has conspicuous merits.
The style, though now and again forced to a witti-
cism, is often as lucid and supple as Thackeray's best ;
the sketches of character scattered up and down the
book are admirably fresh and truthful, nor does the
fact that he afterwards drew them on a larger scale

84 THACKERAY

impair their interest and veracity. As I have said,
Thackeray made no scruple of repeating himself, and
The Book of Snobs^ no less than The Sketch Books^ con-
tains the ravir material of much fiction. Cinqbars
and Glenlivat, my lady Carabas and the Honourable
Sir George Tufto, were already alive in the pages of
Punch, and the years did no more than add to their
natural growth. But The Book of Snobs touched the
popular fancy, and made Thackeray famous. It
achieved more than this : it profoundly influenced its
author. Thackeray once told Motley that " the Snob
Papers were those of his writings he liked the least,"
and we can easily believe it. None the less he
never shook himself free from its bondage. Hence-
forth he was, more often than not, a chronicler of
snobs, and it was only when his imagination carried
him back to the eighteenth century that he forgot the
twisted standard of life he had himself set up. It is
not uncommon, this spectacle of an author enslaved
by his own book ; but the slavery dimmed Thack-
eray's outlook upon the world, and it is impossible to
observe without regret the complacency wherewith
he answered the too urgent demand of the people.

To enumerate the miscellaneous prose and verse
which Thackeray sent to Punch in some ten years
were a thankless task. Wherever he went, to Brigh-
ton or to the East, he found time for a column of
jocular correspondence. But there are one or two
works which have deservedly been saved from the
wreckage of journalism. The Novels by Eminent
Hands are the best, as they were the first, of their

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 85

kind — witty, pertinent, and good-natured. The
Travels in London and Mr. Brown s Letters to his
Nephew echo in every line the shrewd, middle-aged
man of the world, in whose pompous garb their au-
thor liked to masquerade. So he wrote much and
easily, and found time for the visits to Paris, which
were his best-loved pleasures. " He is in full play
and pay in London," wrote FitzGerald, "writing in
a dozen reviews, and a score of newspapers : and
while health lasts he sails before the wind." And
his success was due in great measure to Punch.
Punch., in other words, cut the string of his balloon,
which presently sped across the sky amid trailing
clouds of glory. One visible renown was a silver
statuette of the humpback presented him in 1848 by
Dr. John Brown and other admirers in Edinburgh.
Moreover, he could at last be easily placed. " Thack-
eray .^ Yes. The man on Punch ; " and once a
man is " placed," fame is never long in reaching him.
Nevertheless, he felt the strain of journalism, as all
must feel it. No sooner did he sit down to his
novel, whichever it might be, than a promised article
diverted him, and the terms on which he lived with
some of his colleagues did not lessen the strain. So
that his resignation, in 1853, ^^^ neither unexpected
nor inexplicable. He wrote to his mother that "it
was a general scorn and sadness which made him give
up Punch," and no doubt it was fatigue as well as a
difference of policy which induced his resignation.
In 1849 ^^ ^°^^ ^''^- Brookfield that he " was get-
ting so weary of Punch that he thought he must

86 THACKERAY

have done with it." Four years later he had
done with it. " What do you think I have done
to-day ? " he wrote to the same friend; " I have sent
in my resignation to Punch. There appears in next

Punch an article so wicked, I think, by poor ,

that upon my word I don't think I ought to pull any
longer in the same boat with such a savage little
Robespierre. The appearance of this incendiary ar-
ticle put me in such a rage that I could only cool my-
self with a ride in the park."

The article was an attack upon Louis Napoleon,
which Thackeray believed to be "dangerous for the
welfare and peace of the country." Nor was the
epilogue to his collaboration more agreeable than the
reason of his departure. Punch, like all those who
reserve to themselves the right of flaying others by ad-
verse criticism, has always been exquisitely sensitive
to the faintest reproach. A year after he had re-
signed, Thackeray, in an article upon Leech con-
tributed to The ^arterly, wrote " half a line regard-
ing his old Punch companions," to quote a letter ad-
dressed to Mr. Evans,' " which was perfectly true,
which I have often said, but which I ought not to
have written." The half-line is wholly void of of-
fence, yet Punch resented it with all the fury of a
delicate critic. " Fancy a number of Punch," wrote
Thackeray, " without Leech's pictures ! What
would you give for it? The learned gentlemen who
write the work must feel that without, it were as well

1 The letter is printed at length in Mr. Spielmann's History of
Punch.

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 87

left alone. Surely there is nothing for offence in so
moderate a statement, in which, moreover, Thackeray
included himself. But the offence was given, and it
could only be purged by a dinner of reconciliation.
However, Thackeray had loyally served the journal
which, in its time, had been of excellent service to
him, and had found an appreciative audience for the
novels which had been appearing month after month
during the past six years.

On January i, 1847, there was published in a yellow
wrapper, now famous, the first number of Vanity Fair.
Until the fifth number, we are told, the story aroused
little interest, and the publishers, in the prudence of
their souls, were half persuaded to suppress it. Then
suddenly a trivial circumstance — the appearance, 'tis
said, of Mrs. Perkins's Ball — aroused the popular curi-
osity, and all the world was chattering of Vanity Fair.
Thus it is that books are commonly found good or bad
by accident, and owe what is called " success '' to any
other element than their own merit. But Vanity Fair
was doubly fortunate : deliberate criticism echoed the
people's voice, and before the story was half finished
it had been reviewed — with outspoken appreciation —
by Abraham Hayward in The Edinburgh. To-day the
heavy artillery of the quarterlies can neither kill a foe
nor save a friend ; but fifty years ago opinions were
not framed and broken in a night, and, incredible
though it seem, an article by Hayward helped to
decide the fate of the book.

Thackeray, then, was happy in the reception of
Vanity Fair, and the passing years have confirmed the

88 THACKERAY

instant verdict. Indeed, stubborn as is the mind of
man, it would have been surprising if the book had
not touched the taste of the town. For it was fresh
both in matter and manner. It owed nothing to con-
temporaneous foppery ; it was as remote from Bulwer
as from Ainsworth. As in his shorter stories, so in
Vanity Fair, Thackeray forgot the rivals who en-
vironed him, and went back for inspiration to the
true English novel of Fielding. He called the book
" a novel without a hero " ; he might have called it
a novel without a plan. He confesses himself that
the moral crept in of itself, and that he " wasn't
going to write in this way when he began." In other
words, the story grew as it chose, from month to
month, and dragged its author after it. And this ex-
plains its failure to stop when it should. The logical
end of the book is Rawdon Crawley's appointment to
the Governorship of Coventry Island, and the re-
gathering of the threads — over 150 pages — is a wan-
ton and tedious operation.

So far as its construction goes, Vanity Fair is a
novel of adventure, of adventure in society, where
hearts and banks are broken more easily than heads
or dynasties ; and despite his own declaration that he
wanted to make " a set of people living without God
in the world," the book has not a plan or motive in
the sense that Balzac and the moderns have under-
stood it. For Thackeray, although he might, and he
chose, have studied the Com'edie Humaine, remained
old-fashioned to the end, and let his personages wander
up and down as they listed, content if only he could

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 89

now and again slip in a sentiment, or castigate a
favourite vice on his own account. But the charge
commonly brought against Vanity Fair that it is heart-
less and cynical cannot be sustained for a moment.
A novel of manners does not exhaust the whole of
human life, and Thackeray had a perfect right to
choose such puppets for his shows as aroused his
keenest interest. Nor is the book merely a novel
of manners ; it is a satire as well. The author does
not ask his readers to profess sympathy with his ruf-
fians. He demands no more than an appreciation
of a witty presentment and of deft draughtsmanship.
If he had suppressed the sentiment, which ever rose
up in his heart. Vanity Fair might have been as
un-moral as The Way of the IVorld, and what a mas-
terpiece it would have been ! Even Amelia, a very
Niobe of tears, is drawn with a cold contempt, and
I am not certain that she is not as savage a piece of
satire as Becky herself.

But Thackeray, though he loved to masquerade as
a man of the world, could not help looking even at
his own creations with an eye of pity or dislike.
He plays the same part in his books as is played in
Greek tragedy by a chorus of tiresome elders, and it
is this constant intrusion which gives certain passages
in Vanity Fair a rakish, almost a battered, air. The
reader would never dream of taking such persons as
Rawdon and his Aunt seriously, were he not told to
do so by the author of their being. The reader, had
he been allowed, would have been content with an
artistic appreciation. But, says Thackeray, " as we

90 THACKERAY

bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a
man and a brother, not only to introduce them, but
occasionally to step down from the platform and talk
about them; if they are good and kindly, to love
them, and shake them by the hand." And that is
what he is too often — a man and a brother ; he for-
gets the impartiality of the artist, and goes about bab-
bling with his own puppets.

These excesses of sentiment are plain for all to see.
They interrupt the progress of the story with irritating
frequency. They put a needless accent upon what is
called the "cynicism " of Thackeray, and confuse the
very simple method of the book. " Picture to your-
self, oh fair young reader," exclaims the author of
Miss Crawley, " a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless,
religionless old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and
•without her wig. Picture her to yourself, and ere you
be old, learn to love and pray." The reference to the
wig betrays an animus which should never disturb a
novelist's serenity, and Miss Crawley is otherwise so
well drawn that she might safely be left to point her
own moral. So on another page he reminds us, with
his eye upon the obvious, that " the bustle, and
triumph, and laughter, and gaiety which Vanity Fair
exhibits in public do not always pursue the performer
into private life." And from this point of view he
defines the purpose of his romance. "This, dear
friends and companions," so he writes in his most
intimate style, " is my amiable object — to walk with
you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the
shows there ; and that we should all come home after

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 9 1

the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be per-
fectly miserable in private." But vv'hy should we be
miserable — in private or public — about that in which
our interest is, or should be, purely artistic ?

However, he is so closely set upon disquisition
that he cannot refrain the hand of sentiment even from
the character of Rawdon Crawley, whose rough,
amiable brutality might have been pictured without a
flaw. When the guardsman, who shot Captain
Marker, visits Queen's Crawley with his Rebecca,
even he, under the auspices of Thackeray, is some-
what abashed. " What recollections of boyhood and
innocence might have been flitting across his brain ? "
asks the novelist. " What pangs of dim remorse and
doubt and shame ? " If elsewhere the excellent
Rawdon is drawn with justice, no pangs of remorse
or shame would have flitted across his brain, and the
character is weakened by each attempt made by the
author's sentimentality to weaken that " spirit of one-
ness " which should animate it. We resent the in-
terpolation of moral comment, even when Amelia is
the moralist's excuse. " By heavens ! it is pitiful,"
exclaims Thackeray, " the bootless love of women
for children in Vanity Fair." What is all this but a
confession of weakness. A story which needs anno-
tation fails of its main purpose, and the reader may
justly feel irritated who is not left to form his own
conclusions.

It is especially in satire that sermonising has no
place, for satire is of itself a method of reproof.
Though Aristophanes at times laid aside the lash for

92 THACKERAY

the lyre, he knew the limits of his genre too well to
lapse into moral discourses. But Thackeray acts the
sheep-dog to his own characters. He plays propriety
before them, very much as Miss Briggs ensured the
public respectability of Becky Sharp. And when he
is angry with them, he scolds them with almost a
shrewish tongue. But, despite this concession to his
own and the popular taste, Thackeray — with Vanity
Fair — well deserved the place which he won in the
literature of his age. Its style, peculiarly simple and
straightforward, was free both from rhetoric and orna-
ment. It suppressed all the tricks of the novelist, and
threw what discredit it could upon fine writing. At
the same time, it was various enough to express the
diverse persons and changing emotions which are the
material of the book. The characters are as dis-
tinguished as the style. Seldom in the history of
English romance had a more genteel company been
gathered together, and even when it is disreputable, it
is still the best of bad company. Moreover, it is
characteristic of the author that for all his moralisings
he is most sincerely interested in his blackguards. He
cares so little himself for Amelia ' that he cannot ex-
pect to awake an appreciation in his readers; while

' There is little doubt that Thackeray despised Amelia. When
Vanity Fair was being published, "he used to talk about it" to
Liddell and his wife, " and what he should do with the persons."
Mrs. Liddell said one day : " Oh, Mr. Thackeray, you must let
Dobbin marry Amelia." " Well," he replied, " he shall, and when
he has got her, he will not find her worth having." See Dean
Liddell's Life, p. 8,

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 93

Dobbin, for all his nobility, is purposely awkward
where he is not ridiculous.

But Becky Sharp, always the central figure of the
book, is drawn with a firmer hand and brighter
colours. You must travel far indeed before you find
so good a portrait of the incarnate minx. When she
is off the stage the action languishes ; the squalor of
Queen's Crawley, the grimness of Gaunt House, hold
our attention merely as they affect the true heroine of
the book. When first she appears, flinging the
" dixonary " out of the window, the true note of her
character is struck, and never once does it ring false.
" She was small and slight in person," thus she is
described ; " pale, sandy-haired, and with eyes habit-
ually cast down : when they looked up, they were
very large, odd, and attractive." They had already
done execution upon the curate, and they were ready
to vanquish fat Jos. Sedley, or a whole wilderness
of Crawleys. In truth, there was scarce a member of
that aristocratic family which did not instantly suc-
cumb to her artillery. In less than a year she had
won the Baronet's confidence ; she was a trouvaille
in the eyes of Miss Crawley; the Captain was wild
about her; and even Mrs. Bute was never happy out
of her sight. Her airs and graces, delicately touched
by French influence, were irresistible, and "when she
was agitated, and alluded to her maternal relative, she
spoke with ever so slight a foreign accent, which gave
a great charm to her clear, ringing voice."

Thus with success she assumed a certainty of
manner which, though natural to her, was unsuspected

94 THACKERAY

by her early friends. When first she encountered
George Osborne, after a sojourn in Hampshire, she
^bullied him in fine style. "But, oh! Mr. Osborne,
what a difference eighteen months' experience makes !
eighteen months spent, pardon me for saying so, with
gentlemen." How admirably, too, she comports her-
self in the first strong situation of the book, when she
is forced to confess her marriage to Sir Pitt ! " I
can't be your wife, sir," says she, with exquisite
humility ; " let me — let me be your daughter." And
when she is married, and exiled from the world of the
Crawleys, with what skill does she manage the
sharper's victims, with what address does she present
Mrs. Crawley's husband to society ! Then, again,
the campaign which she conducts at Brussels — that
little campaign within a great one — is as triumphant as
the Duke's. She manages friends and foes with equal
success and eflrontery ; the famous ball is her peculiar
victory ; she insults Amelia, while she captures the
heart of the cad, Amelia's husband ; and, best of all,
she repels the interested advances of Lady Bareacres,
with an insolence which enchants you, though it prove
her lack of breeding.

Like all the great, she is without scruple and with-
out pity. She robs Briggs as cheerfully as she ruins
Raggles, and she permits no consideration of kindness
or loyalty to interrupt her intrigue. In brief, she is
rare among the creations of Thackeray because she is
uniform and homogeneous. Even Rawdon feels the
twinges of remorse, but Becky knows no remorse save
failure. When she attends Sir Pitt's funeral at

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 95

Queen's Crawley, she lets her mind wander back to
10 the past in a spirit of gratulation. "I have passed
ii beyond it, because I have brains," thought she, " and
almost all the rest of the world are fools." Brilliant
as is her conquest of the Marquis, she reveals the ad-
venturess yet more splendidly in her victory over Sir
Pitt the younger. " You remain a baronet," says she
to him. " No, Sir Pitt Crawley, I know you better.
I know your talents and ambition. You fancy you
hide them both : but you can conceal neither from
me. I showed Lord Steyne your pamphlet on Malt."
So the trap is laid in sight of the bird, baited with
praise and approached by vanity. But Becky never
falls below her opportunity : her entry into Gaunt
House is superb ; and the moment of her greatest
triumph, when she sits at the grand exclusive table
with his Royal Highness, and is served on gold plate,
is worth the years of intrigue which had achieved it.
There is a certain attraction even in her degringolade,
and though one wishes she had not tried to fascinate
Lord Steyne anew, she shows a fine spirit of gaiety
and courage in the sombre atmosphere of Pumper-
nickel. "She was at home with everybody in the
place — pedlars, punters, tumblers, students, and all."
Though her adversaries were meaner, and the stakes
lower, she was still playing the same game of life
which she played against the Marquis of Steyne, and,
after her fashion, she was a winner to the end.

Such is the central figure of Vanity Fair^ and some
others, though they do but enhance Rebecca's
splendour, are drawn with an equally sure hand.

96 THACKERAY

Throughout the book there is a sense of life touched
by caricature, which has kept it fresh in an age of
changed morals and different taste. Above all,
IThackeray shows himself an adept in bringing his
-^characters on the scene, and in setting forth their
dominant traits in half-a-dozen lines. At Rawdon
Crawley's first appearance, the reader has an intimate
acquaintance with that deboshed dragoon. " A per-
fect and celebrated ' blood,' or dandy about town, was
this young officer. Boxing, rat-hunting, the fives'
court,' and four-in-hand were the fashion of the
British aristocracy ; and he was an adept in all these
noble sciences. And though he belonged to the
Household troops, who, as it was their duty to rally
round theTPrince Regent, had not shown their valour
in foreign service yet, Rawdon Crawley had already
(a propos of play, of which he was immoderately fond)
fought three bloody duels, in which he gave ample
proofs of his contempt for death." This passage
puts you on terms with the hero at once, and your
acquaintance is cemented by Becky's own comment :

' The Fives' Court does not mean the home of the innocent sport
pursued by Cavanagh. It was the haunt of the Fancy, and there
the prize-fighters had their tournaments. The following lines de-
scribe its character eloquently enough : —

" I've left the Fives' Court rush — the flash— the rally ;
The noise of ' Go it, Jack ' — the stop — the blow —
The shout — the chattering hit — the check — the sally,"

They are to be found in Peter Corcoran's The Fancy (1820), the
work of J, H, Reynolds, the friend of Keats, Jack, it may be
noted in passing, is Randall, the Nonpareil, the hero " good with
both hands, and only ten stone four."

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR 97

"Well, he is a very large young dandy. He is six
feet high, and speaks with a great voice, and swears a
great deal ; and orders about the servants, who all
adore him nevertheless."

Such was the Samson whose locks his Becky
sheared, and his gradual submission is the one pathetic
episode of the book. He is not very wise. His
single talent is for gaming, and though his constant
success suggested a charge of foul play, the charge
was never justified. At the beginning of a game he
would play carelessly, but his style was transformed
by loss, and he always got up from the table a winner.
At billiards he pursued the same tactics. " Like a
great general," says Thackeray, " his genius used to
rise with the danger, and when the luck had been un-
favourable to him for a whole game, and the bets were
consequently against him, he would with consummate
skill and boldness make some prodigious hits which
would restore the battle, and come in a victor at the
end, to the astonishment of everybody — of everybody,
that is, who was a stranger to his play." Becky, in
fact, was the one adversary to whom he succumbed,
and it was his simple devotion that undid him. At
first he believed in her affection with a childlike faith,
but, as she gradually deserted him, he was driven to a
more equal alliance with his son. Nor did he recover
his senses until he was trapped to the sponging-house,
in which crisis of his fate he bore himself as a soldier
and a gentleman. Rawdon Crawley, in brief, is not
merely sympathetic, he is also true to life. Now, this
is the more striking, since Vanity Fair is composed in

98 THACKERAY

varying planes of caricature. The elder Sir Pitt and
Dobbin, for instance, do not inhabit the same world,
while the atmosphere which Peggy O'Dowd breathes
is not the same as enwraps the Lady Jane. In other
words, burlesque and realism jostle up and- dowrt-the
book, and it is not always easy to interpret the author's
meaning. But Rawdon, despite certain extravagances
of diction and manner, is more of a man than the
most of those whom he encounters, and he finds no
worthy rival outside the works of Thackeray. Com-
pare him to Sir Mulberry Hawk or the bucks of
Bulwer, and in a moment you will realise his superi-
ority. And though many a writer has tried his hand
since at the delineation of the British dandy, frozen
in Lord Dundreary to a type, Rawdon Crawley holds
his own after fifty years.

With the same ease Thackeray presents his other
characters. No sooner does old Sir Pitt shoulder
Becky's trunk than we know him for what he is.
The author, indeed, saves his baronet from improba-
bility by introducing him to a note of extravagant
caricature ; and after his supper with Mrs. Tinker
nothing that he does or says can surprise us. But
that is due rather to Thackeray's skill than to the
old man's verisimilitude. If we may believe Charles
Kingsley, Sir Pitt is " almost the only exact portrait
in the book"; and yet you will match him more
nearly in the Restoration comedy than in modern
Hampshire. He might well have sat upon the bench
with Sir John Brute. "Who do you call a drunken
fellow, you slut you.?" asks Sir John of his wife;

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR QQ

^-" I'm a man of quality ; the King has made me a
knight." ^ Is not that boast composed in precisely
the same spirit as Sir Pitt's introduction to Becky .?
" He, he ! ['m Sir Pitt Crawley. Reklect you owe
me a pint for bringing down your luggage. He, he !
Ask Tinker if I ain't."

The Rev. Bute is painted in more modest colours :
" A tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted man," was he,
who " had a fine voice, sang ' A southerly wind and a
cloudy sky,' and gave the whoop in chorus with gen-
eral applause. He rode to hounds in a pepper-and-
salt frock, and was one of the best fishermen in the
county." But Thackeray is at his best with the
Crawleys, and all save the younger Pitt, who is mon-
strous, carry the blood of human life in their veins.
Miss Crawley, an admirable specimen of the selfish
worldling, trained to egoism by wealth and Jacobin
literature, never rings false save in the comments of
her creator, while " the eager, active, black-faced "
Mrs. Bute, " the smart, active little body who wrote

.;- her husband's sermons," is a more pestilent schemer
than Becky herself, without Becky's wit or Becky's
fascination. Excellent, too, though in another vein,
are the Osbornes, father and son. True, the British
merchant is a trifle conventional ; but the young sol-
dier, who would be a gentleman, is assuredly one of
the best (or worst) cads in fiction.

It is, then, for a ^t of well-drawn characters,
touched one and all with caricature, that we especially
value Vanity Fair ; yet in praising the characters we
^ ' See Sir John Vanbrugh's TAe Provoked Wife, Act iv. sc. iv.

lOO THACKERAY

must not forget the situations in which they play their
part. It is said that when Thackeray wrote the scene
wherein Rawdon Crawley surprises his wife with Lord
Steyne he exclaimed," By Jove ! that's genius." And
with some right, since he had led up to that memora-
ble crisis with far more than his usual skill. Still bet-
ter, and far less showy, is the episode of Waterloo, in
which, for the first time, Thackeray proved how well
he could give a romantic turn to history. The mod-
ern novelist, if he pitched upon the year 1815 for his
period, would make no scruple of dragging Napoleon
and Wellington upon his mimic scene. He would be
intrepid enough to make these heroes talk the com-
monest platitudes to their friends ; he would vulgarise
their speeches by the accent of his own suburb ; or
in the other extreme he would present them as the
dummies of a pedantic archaeologist. Thackeray's
method is vastly more artistic. The chapters in which
the drama of Waterloo is presented are dominated by
great events, but only the distant rumble of the guns
is heard, and the reader never gets nearer to the bat-
tle-field than Brussels. In other words, Thackeray
does not lose hold of his own personages. He has
no desire to show how they affect history — that is the
foolish method of the historical novelist; he prefers
to show how history affects them — a much more
reasonable process. When you recall his description
of Waterloo, it is Jos. Sedley's spirited escape and
the poor, silly Amelia's tragedy that leap to your
mind. "No more firing was heard at Brussels — the
pursuit rolled miles away. Darkness came down on

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR lOI

the field and city : and Amelia was praying for George,
who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through
his heart." That gives us a more vivid vision of the
battle than the mock heroics of a false Napoleon, and
is truer, besides, both to fiction and to fact.

Vanity Fair is not, broadly speaking, a roman a clef^
but the ingenious have identified certain characters,
and there is no doubt that Thackeray owed something
of his inspiration to living men and women. At the
same time, it is rash to push resemblances too far : as
did the foolish gossip who detected Charlotte Bronte
in Becky Sharp, and declared that Rochester was a
portrait, drawn in revenge, of Thackeray himself.
That is reducing a hazardous method to absurdity ;
yet Thackeray did not overlook his contemporaries,
and even Becky is said to have had her original.
" One morning a hansom drove up to the door," says
Mrs. Ritchie, " and out of it there emerged the most
charming, dazzling little lady dressed in black, who
greeted my father with great affection and brilliancy,
and who, departing presently, gave my father a large
bunch of fresh violets." The " dazzling little lady "
was supposed to be Becky, though Thackeray, of
course, never confessed that a model sat for his her-
oine ; but Dobbin's amiability absolved his author
from reticence, and there is no doubt that John Allen,
Archdeacon of Salop, Thackeray's friend and con-
temporary at Cambridge, suggested some traits of the
awkward, unselfish major. These resemblances, how-
ever, are slight and unimportant. The Marquis of
Steyne and Mr. Wenham, on the other hand, have

102 THACKERAY

been generally recognised for Lord Hertford and Mr.
Croker, and they better than any others will show how
Thackeray turned biography into fiction. They are
the more interesting, too, because they were sketched,
almost in competition, with the Monmouth and Rigby
of that master in ironic portraiture, Benjamin Disraeli,
whose knowledge of the men was more profound, and
whose touch was at once more brilliant and more sav-
age than Thackeray's.

When Coningsby was published, in 1844, Thackeray
reviewed it with considerable contempt in The Pic-
torial Times. He declared that the author had " all
the qualities of Pitt and Byron and Burke and the
great Mr. Widdicombe of Batty's amphitheatre."
" Everybody was reading the book," said he, " be-
cause everybody recognises everybody's portrait."
The review is manifestly unfair when we remember
that very soon afterwards Thackeray was trying his
own hand at the presentation of the Marquis of Hert-
ford, and of the gentleman whom he calls " the Right
Honourable John Wilson Joker." It is true that
Thackeray allows himself a wider latitude than his
rival. Yet it is impossible to mistake the original of
Steyne and Wenham, and Thackeray must share the
reproach, if reproach be deserved, which he heaps
upon Mr. Disraeli.' Nor has Thackeray the same

' One passage in Thackeray's review might be justly referred,
without the change of a syllable, to Vanity Fair. " What person
is there," wrote the reviewer, " in town or country, from the squire
down to the lady's maid, who will not be anxious to peruse a work
in which the secrets of high life are so exposed ? In all the fash-

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR

103

excuse as his rival of complete success. Neither the
great noble nor the obsequious parasite of Vanity Fair
is touched with his happiest hand. It is evident that
he spent little care upon the portraiture of Lord
Steyne, who is less a man than a bundle of vices and
brutality. The prejudices which deformed The Book
of Snobs are here very wide awake, and you cannot
but think that in the gross traits of the Marquis the
author is expressing his general dislike of the class to
which the Marquis belongs. It is not as though the
drama were facilitated by the ruffianly behaviour and
aspect of Becky's lover. A man is always more
effective than a monster, and Steyne's monstrosity is
palliated by very few touches of humanity. He is
too much an afFair of buck-teeth and bushy whiskers.
A scowl too often " gathers over his heavy brow."
His jaw is so infamously underhung that you are sur-
prised his friends do not send for the police at his first
apparition. Yet he is represented as the friend of
" the most august personages," and as the daring rival
of Mr. Fox at hazard. His moral aspect is far worse
even than his physical. It is his pleasant pastime to
bully women and children. For instance, he heartily
disliked Becky's boy. " When they met by mis-
chance he made sarcastic bows or remarks to the
child, or glared at him with savage-looking eyes."
Here, indeed, we are at close quarters with the ogre
of the fairy story, and with the best intentions in the

ioiiable novels ever published there is nothing so piquant or so
magnificently genteel. Every politician, too, will read with avidity
— the details are so personal."

I04 THACKERAY

world we can no longer put faith in my Lord
Steyne.

Yet worse remains. When Becky confesses to the
Marquis that she has ruined Briggs his comment is :
" Ruined her ? then why don't you turn her out ? "
Now, though many a man might have cherished this
amiable thought, none, with the habit of life, would
have given it utterance, least of all to a woman who
flattered a passing fancy. Absurd, also, is his be-
haviour at Gaunt House, whose ladies he addresses in
a tone which would disgrace an angry bricklayer ; and
at each excess the reader's faith grows weaker. After
all, the Marquis of Steyne is described as a great
noble, who has lived with princes and conducted em-
bassies ; and though the manners of the Regent's
Court were free enough, they were not marked by the
savagery, inseparable from this ruffian of eyebrows
and hideous grins. In fiction you expect verisimili-
tude, and a novelist is not easily credible who paints
you Bill Sykes and writes the Marquis of Steyne be-
neath the portrait.

To Thackeray Steyne was but an incidental char-
acter. Monmouth is the essence of Disraeli's Con-
ingsby, and is drawn with extraordinary diligence and
insight. It is not astonishing, therefore, that where
Thackeray presented a monster, Disraeli presented a
man. Steyne is symbolised by a tooth. Monmouth
is a grand seigneur., with a taste for evil courses. His
aspect, if forbidding, is still magnificent, and his
temper, while autocratic, is never brutal. He evades
scenes as eagerly as Lord Steyne courts them, since it

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR IO5

is more agreeable to his dignity to have his own way
without argument; and he never forgets his nobility,
even though he is inexorable in revenge or hate. His
fine manners fascinate the countryside, and for a
selfish man his good humour is remarkable. But
none dare take advantage of his amiability. Even
Coningsby finds him " superb and icy " ; and it is not
surprising, for he is one "whose contempt for man-
kind was absolute, — not a fluctuating sentiment, not
a mournful conviction ebbing and flowing with cir-
cumstances, but a fixed, profound, unalterable in-
stinct."

Adonmouth, in fact, is plainly drawn from the life :
he has many traits, perfectly consistent with each
other, which mark him out from the rest of his kind.
Rich as he is, lofty as is his position, he exhibits a
signal weakness in his love of gold. The experience
of a worldly life has taught him that a rich man can-
not be bought, and that which you cannot buy be-
comes invested in his eyes " with a kind of halo
amounting almost to sanctity." So bitterly heartless
is he that he cannot tolerate the presence of any
woman more than two years, and when he is struck
with a fatal illness at his villa at Richmond, he has no
better company about him than Clotilde, Ermengarde,
and their kind.

For the rest, he is pictured as lavish, dissolute,
ease-loving, and tyrannical. He is not exacting, since
he demands of his family no more than obedience, and
of others no more than that they should divert him.
" Members of this family," says he to Coningsby,

Io6 THACKERAY

" may think as they like, but they must act as I
please ; " while at the same time he tolerates Ville-
becque and all his friends, if only they distract his
mind. Above all, he is determined to avoid anything
that is disagreeable ; and it is this resolve which ex-
plains the power and influence of Rigby, who is a
loyal buffer between his lordship and the sordid
troubles of life. Physically, too, he is a man, not a
bogey, though he has a certain glance " under which
men always quailed." It is thus that he presents
himself to his nephew: " He was in height above the
middle size, but was somewhat portly and corpulent.
His countenance was strongly marked : sagacity on
the brow, sensuality in the mouth and jaw. His head
was bald, but there were remains of the rich brown
locks on which he once prided himself. His large
deep blue eyes, madid and yet piercing, showed that
the secretions of his brain were apportioned, half to
voluptuousness, half to common-sense. But his gen-
eral mien was truly grand — full of a natural nobility, of
which no one was more sensible than himself." There
is a man seen and studied, no mere phantom of ugli-
ness and bad morals.

It is Monmouth's chief merit to be like a man.
His accurate resemblance to Lord Hertford gives him
an incidental interest. And no student of the early
nineteenth century can deny the excellence of the
portrait. Yet the real Hertford was a far more
amazing creature than his literary portraits suggest.
At first sight the conflicting testimonies seem irrecon-
cilable. Says Greville: "His life and death were

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR I07

equally disgusting and revolting to every good and
moral feeling." Says Croker : " I never Knew a man
so fixed upon doing what he considered his duty."
Here are the extremes, each biassed by personal and
political prejudice. But Hertford's character will
always remain unintelligible, until its progress and
decay are both recognised. In his youth, under the
title of Yarmouth, familiarly translated as Red
Herrings, he was among the most brilliant of the
Regent's Court, and was honestly declared to be
" the most good-natured man alive." Gifted with a
better intelligence and a stronger temperament than
his fellows, he more than held his own, whether at
cards or talk, with the dandies of his time. The
manners of the age, no doubt, were loose enough ;
but Hertford was no worse than Brummel, Scrope
Davies and the rest, who are not held up to public
shame. Even his enemies allowed him a talent for
gaiety, which made his parties the most agreeable in
London ; and at cards his supremacy was incontest-
able : he won large sums, because he always played a
cool and shrewd game. He married, too early for a
man of pleasure, the famous Maria Fagniani, and with
her he inherited the ample fortune bequeathed by the
two bucks who claimed to be her father. The mar-
riage was unhappy, and Lady Hertford was for many
years the ma'itresse en titre of Marshal Junot. But it
could not well have prospered, since Hertford, like
Monmouth, did not long endure the society of any
woman.

Meanwhile, for all his gaiety and his gambling, he

I08 THACKERAY

was sent to Paris and elsewhere as Envoy Extra-
ordinary, he was appointed Lord Warden of the
Stannaries, he held more than one office in the
Household, and, though he is a favourite subject for
the political satirist (as what Tory was not ?), he is
not always held up to contempt. One set of doggerel
verses, indeed, picture him as kicking the Regent for
his infamous behaviour to a lady — a piece of daring
chivalry, such as is seldom put down to his credit.
However, in 1822 he succeeded to his father's wealth
and influence, was given the Garter, and asserted his
position as a great noble with all the pomp and cere-
mony which he could command. Thus far he had
been guilty of no act unworthy a courtier, and so
stern a moralist as Peel gave him an unsolicited testi-
monial, of which any man might be proud. " I was
really pleased at Lord Hertford's getting the Garter,"
wrote the statesman. " I was pleased very disinter-
estedly, and for his own sake merely, for I like him.
He is a gentleman, and not an every-day one."

But presently the love of pleasure dominated his
intellect. His cynical contempt for mankind was ex-
pressed in a basely crapulous life, which has eclipsed
the record of his good qualities. After the passing of
the Reform Bill he renounced politics, and took a dis-
like of England ; wherefore he wandered up and down
France and Italy with a band of demireps and parasites
for his camp-followers. Like Steyne, he was haunted
by the fear of madness, which he had inherited along
with his wealth and his titles ; nor is there any doubt
that the excesses of his last years were the result of

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR IO9

senile insanity.^ At the end he was scarce his own
master, and in the last letter addressed to Crolcer he
betrays his own helplessness. " I believe we are
going to change, because they say so, but I don't
know." There is a genuine pathos in this surrender
of a once masterful man. He who had exacted
obedience from all now bowed before the fancy of the
last favourite that chance sent him. But he atoned
for this passing weakness by the ferocity of his will,
a monument of posthumous brutality and cynical in-
solence, which advertised his vices and his savagery
even more loudly than did the habit of his life. Yet
a vast line of carriages followed his remains out of
London, and among them, to the great scandal of the
Duke of Bedford, was the carriage of Sir Robert Peel,
who had remained faithful in his admiration, and who
doubtless would have agreed with Wellington that
" had Hertford lived in London, instead of frittering
away his time in Paris, he would have become Prime
Minister of England." ^ Such was the original of

' " The lamentable doings of his later years," wrote Croker,
" were neither more nor less than insanity. You know, and he
was himself well aware, that there is hereditary madness in the
family. He often talked and even wrote about it to me."

'See Gronow's Reminiscences (1890), vol. ii. p. 323 : -Ah,''
added the Duke of Wellington, " Lord Hertford is a man of extra-
ordinary talent. He deserves to be classed among those men who
possess transcendent abilities. What a pity it is that he does not
live more in England, and occupy his place in the House of Lords-
It was only the other day that Sir Robert Peel observed when
speaking of Hertford that he was a man of great comprehension ;
not only versed in the sciences, but able to animate his mass of
knowledge by a bright and active imagination."

no THACKERAY

Thackeray's Steyne and Disraeli's Monmouth, and
while Steyne is overshadowed by Monmouth, Wen-
ham is completely eclipsed by Rigby, than whom a
fiercer caricature was never drawn.

Mr. Wenham, the satellite, is a sketch faintly dis-
cerned in the background. He is neither finished
with care nor informed with venom. He is mean
enough, to be sure, but commonplace in his meanness.
The portrait, in brief, has neither the force nor the
rascality which distinguish Mr. Nicholas Rigby, the
villain of Coningsby, after whom rather than after na-
ture it seems to be drawn. Of course Wenham's
admiration for his master is liberally expressed. He
declares that his excellent friend, the Marquis of
Steyne, is " one of the most generous and kindest
men in the world, as he is one of the greatest."
When he swears " upon his honour and word as a
gentleman " he " puts his hand on his waistcoat with
a parliamentary air," and he sings his patron's praises
to Rawdon Crawley " with the same fluent oratory "
wherewith he attempts to abash the House of Com-
mons, and with as little effect. But, as the excellent
Captain Macmurdo observed, he " don't stick at a
trifle," and maybe his respect for the Marquis is as
genuine as " one of Mrs. Wenham's headaches."
Nevertheless, he serves his master well, and he saves
a scandal with an adroitness which deceives neither
Macmurdo nor his principal. Indeed, had he not led
the Colonel into an ambush of bailifi^s, his conduct,
contemptible enough, would not have been disgrace-
ful. Yet the intention is clear. The parliamentary

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR IH

manner, the facile eloquence, the cheerful subservi-
ence to the best and greatest of men, proclaim that
Thackeray when he sketched Wenham had in his
mind's eye the conventional portrait of John Wilson
Croker.

Rigby, on the other hand, almost defeats his crea-
tor's animosity. He is so base as to be almost super-
human. He is the parasite incarnate, vilely obse-
quious to the great man his patron, truculently offen-
sive to everybody else. He has allowed Lord Mon-
mouth to buy him body and soul, "with his clear
head, his indefatigable industry, his audacious tongue,
and his ready and unscrupulous pen ; with all his
dates, all his lampoons, all his private memoirs, and
all his political intrigues." There is no office too
menial for his performance, if only his master require
it, and a word or a dinner is enough to atone for the
degradation of the most odious service. At his lord-
ship's command he is always ready with a " slashing "
article, and who is so good at a slashing article as
Rigby ? Or he will bore a country audience with
the French Rovolution, which is his forte, or he will
cheerfully denounce as un-English all the views
wherewith he is not in agreement. So, incapable of
dignity, strange to honour, ignorant of generosity, he
scales the height of his ambition and becomes his pa-
tron's executor. Here is his apotheosis, here is the
halo placed upon his head, at the expense of good
feeling and independence. In most transactions
" there is some portion which no one cares to accom-
plish, and which everybody wishes to be achieved."

112 THACKERAY

And this is Rigby's portion, which he achieves with-
out a murmur of complaint, and for which he is re-
warded by a comfortable legacy and much scandal.

Now, the venom of this portrait lies in its half-
truth. Croker was as good at a " slashing article "
as Rigby himself; he, too, was the obliging friend of
the great ; he, too, took the keenest delight in polit-
ical intrigue. But while all that Rigby accomplished is
turned to his dishonour, Croker was a useful public serv-
ant, a sound man of letters, and a politician of keen
though narrow intelligence. His gift of organisation
was conspicuous. He proved himself an excellent
Secretary to the Admiralty; he helped to establish
The Quarterly Review;^ and he was the effective
founder of the Athenaeum Club. Noscitur a sodis,
and he cannot be wholly bad who is the associate of
Wellington, Peel, Scott, and Lockhart. The great
Duke, indeed, regarded Croker as his oldest and clos-
est friend, and there is no great man of that age whose

' It was in T^e Quarterly that Croker did his best work, and
though his judgment in politics was generally sound, it was marred
by an habitual violence of expression. Malevolence was so deeply
ingrained in him, that he was unconscious of its use, and, in truth,
it was a fault of style rather than a depravation of thought. At the
same time. The Quarterly would have been better without him.
Sir Walter Scott, who loved the man, saw at the very outset how
great a danger he was to The Quarterly. Yet after thirty years he
was still supplying sixty-four pages to each number, and sprinkling
the articles of others from the pepper-box of his abuse. Lockhart
resigned himself humbly to be " over-Crokered." It took the
courage of Elwin, a country parson, to get rid of him, and even
Elwin allowed that he had " fine and generous elements in his
nature."

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR II3

house and society Croker did not frequent. His
friendship with Hertford was of old standing, and on
Croker's side disinterested ; and since Hertford was a
man of cultivation as well as of pleasure, the friend
of poets and of Ministers, his acquaintance was not of
itself a disgrace to any one. Moreover, for many
years the Secretary of the Admiralty managed the
Marquis's estates, and took not a penny for his
trouble. Even the prosecution of Suisse, the black-
guardly valet who, with the aid of one of Hertford's
cast-off mistresses, Angeline Borel, had stolen many
thousands of pounds, was an act of courage. Croker
could not profit by the case, which inevitably involved
him in an ugly scandal. Yet he did not shrink from
an executor's duty, and has stood in the pillory ever
since.

He has been attacked by common consent. Nor
is party spite enough to explain the malevolence of
his critics.^ Macaulay, of course, attacked him be-
cause he did not like his political views, and made no
attempt to hide his malice. " See whether I do not
dust that varlet's jacket for him in the next number

' At least one political opponent has sung his praises. " Croker,"
wrote Lord Brougliam, "was a most important person in Opposi-
tion. Nothing could exceed liis ability and his thorough knowledge
of Ms subject. . . . His talents were of a very high order, and
have not, I think, been sufficiently allowed. He was also a man
of great personal kindness to his friends, tliough a good hater of liis
enemies, and so much devoted to his opinions that he voluntarily
retired from Parliament as soon as the Reform Bill passed, and he
never returned." In this tribute there is nothing to suggest either
Wenham or Rigby.

114 THACKERAY

of Blue and Yellow," he wrote, before the Boswell
appeared; "I detest him more than cold boiled veal."
But Disraeli was not influenced by public animosity,
and Thackeray (maybe) did no more than follow
Disraeli's lead. What, then, is the cause of this
fierce and various hostility ? The ^arterly is partly
to blame. For many years it was the world's habit to
ascribe all harsh criticisms to the single pen of Croker.
It is an old trick, as common now as then, but as-
suredly it put upon Croker many an undeserved
affront. But The ^arterly, at its bitterest, was in-
sufficient to arouse the cloud of obloquy which
enveloped Croker. It must be confessed also that his
temperament was unsympathetic. He liked to have a
finger in everybody's pie, and he possessed a curious
talent for making himself indispensable to the great.
Not that he was subservient. In fact his independ-
ence of spirit shines clearly in every page of his
Memoirs. But he found himself more at ease and
proved himself more agreeable among his superiors
than among his equals, and it was this faculty more
than any other that rendered him unpopular. But in
face of odium he betrayed no resentment. When
Thackeray was not elected to the Athenaeum,
Croker interfered in his favour, and when the libel
of Coningsby was pointed out to him many years
after its publication, he declared that he never read
novels, and heard of Rigby for the first time !

Thus, chiefly because he was contemptuous and
morose, Croker has been held up by two novelists as
the vilest of men. Thackeray's Wenham, like

PUNCH AND VANITY FAIR II5

Thackeray's Steyne, is but a partial portrait, which
reproduces no more than one imagined trait. It
suggests neither slashing articles nor political fidelity.
It suggests neither undigested learning nor a taste for
the French Revolution, and it must be confessed that
Rigby, like Monmouth, is far closer to the original.
And this enables us to contrast Disraeli's method with
Thackeray's. Disraeli, when he drew a character
from life, drew it with his eye unrelentingly fixed
upon the object. Thackeray, on the other hand, was
content with a suggestion, and declared that " he
never consciously copied anybody." Yet with Con-
ingsby before him, he cannot evade the responsibility
of Steyne and Wenham, though these, to be sure, are
remote enough to be innocuous.

CHAPTER V

PENDENNIS. THACKERAY AND THE WORLD OF
LETTERS

Meanwhile Thackeray had deserted Bohemia for
Tyburnia or its outskirts. In other words, he had
exchanged the lodging of a bachelor for a house in
Kensington, and was overjoyed at his prosperity.
The letters addressed about this time to Mrs. Brook-
field reveal an exultant happiness, tempered now and
again by "blue devils," which is very agreeable to
contemplate. No man ever took a keener pleasure
in increased wealth and growing fame than did
Thackeray, and he expresses his pleasure with an
almost boyish simplicity. He frequents the houses
of the great with a pride which neither Mr. Pendennis
nor Clive Newcome could surpass, and if it were not
for the humour of the situation, whereof he was per-
fectly conscious, he might have afforded material for
another chapter of The Book of Snobs. One day he
is " to dine with the Dowager Duchess of Bedford,
afterwards to Mrs. Procter's, afterwards to Lady
Granville's." Another day it is the Duke of Devon-
shire, or Sir Robert Peel, or Lord Lansdowne who
seeks his company. He is naively delighted when he
is pointed out with the finger. " Lady C, beautiful,
serene, stupid old lady," he writes ; " she asked. Isn't
ii6

PENDENNIS 117

that the great Mr. Thackeray ? O ! my stars, think
of that ! " So he accepted the role of the great Mr.
Thackeray without a shred of false modesty, and ex-
claimed in the proper phrase of the time, "What a
jaunty ofF-hand satiric rogue I am to be sure, — and a
gay young dog." He was so gay a young dog that
all houses were open to him, and his attitude towards
life and society is at once more amiable and just than
his books suggest. He is content with good company
of whatever sort it be, and after dining sumptuously
at the table of a " fortunate youth," " the young
men," he writes, " were clever, very frank and
gentlemanlike ; quite as pleasant companions as one
deserves to meet, and as for your humble servant, he
saw a chapter or two of Pendennis in some of them."
Nor is he blind to the advantages of his social emi-
nence. It even strikes him, as his daughter sorts the
cards in the chimney-glass, " that there are people
who would give their ears, or half their incomes, to
go to these fine places."

Abroad, as at home, he is accorded the respect due
to a great man. In Paris " the Embassy is wonder-
fully civil ; Lord Normanby is my dearest friend,"
and he watches the Opera from Rothschild's box.
And then he escapes from his smart friends to spend
an evening with Jules Janin, whom once he flayed in
the interest of Dickens, and who now delights him.
Janin tells him that he is always entirely happy, that
he had never known repentance or satiety, and
Thackeray sketches an enchanting portrait of him,
which is very far from Balzac's bitter satire. He

Il8 THACKERAY

pictures him "bouncing about the room, gesticulat-
ing, joking, gasconading, quoting Latin, pulling out
his books, which are very handsome, and tossing
about his curling brown hair ; — a magnificent, jolly,
intelligent face, such as would suit Pan, I should
think, a flood of humorous, rich, jovial talk." In
either capital he sees the best, and the best of many
kinds. His catholicity, in life at least, is remarkable.
He meets Sir Robert Peel at a picture-gallery, and who
do you think is the next person with whom he shakes
hands ? Why, Mrs. Rhodes, of the Back Kitchen,
and perhaps he is more at his ease with her than with
the great Minister. Though his preference for the
world of fashion is frank enough, he lived on terms
of intimacy with many of his confreres. Perhaps he
was never quite happy with Dickens, but until a fool-
ish quarrel divided them they were familiar friends,
and Dickens never had a more generous admirer than
Thackeray. Carlyle and Macaulay, Brookfield and
FitzGerald, Tennyson and the Procters, were his
loyal associates, and once in Paris he cheerfully allows
himself to be patronised by the great Harrison Ains-
worth. Charlotte Bronte's admiration for him is no-
torious. He resembled Fielding, she declared, "as an
eagle does a vulture." But this resemblance did not
prevent her from being in great trouble about his soul.
" He stirs in me both sorrow and anger," she wrote.
" Why should he lead so harassing a life ? Why
should his mocking tongue so perversely deny the
better feelings of his better moods ? " Of course
she took him and others too seriously, but Thackeray

PENDENNIS 119

alone frightened her. In his presence, she confesses,
she was " fearfully stupid," and on the evening when
first she met him, " excitement and exhaustion made
savage work of her." But the admiration on either
side was sincere, and while she dedicated 'Jane Eyre
to the author of Vanity Fair, Thackeray repaid the
compliment by writing a touching and sympathetic
introduction to Emma.

Happy in his friends, Thackeray was happy also in
his work. There was scarce a number of Vanity
Fair which he did not produce " with inexpressible
throes." But when the work was done he took a
frank pleasure in it. He highly approved the simplic-
ity of his style, and he never grew tired of his own
characters. On one occasion he re-reads The Hog-
garty Diamond, and " upon my word and honour,"
says he, " if it doesn't make you cry, I shall have a
mean opinion of you." About the same time he is
going to visit the Hotel de la Terrasse at Brussels,
" where Becky used to live. I shall pass by Captain
Osborne's lodging, where I recollect meeting him and
his little wife, who has married again, somebody told
me ; but it is always the way with these grandes pas-
sions — Mrs. Dobbins, or some such name, she is now ;
always an overrated woman, I thought. How curious
it is ! I believe perfectly in all those people, and feel
quite an interest in the inn in which they lived."

But his novel, though it brought him fame and
pleasure, did not bring him wealth, and he was still
dependent upon journalism for a livelihood. Though
he had given up The Examiner in 1845, he began, in

I20 THACKERAY

the very midst of Vanity Fair^ "to blaze away in The
Chronicle again : it's an awful bribe that five guineas
an article." The novelist of to-day would doubtless
turn up his nose at the poor pittance which Thack-
eray received for his early novels — £^o a part, 'tis
said, drawings and all. And the truth is, that when
he had to pay a call of £ii2 on an abominable Irish
railway he was embarrassed to find the money. In-
deed, at the very time that Vanity Fair was bringing
him glory he was called to the Bar, in the hope, no
doubt, that he, the eagle, might follow Fielding, the
vulture, to the magisterial bench. But, happily, this
ambition and another (of a secretaryship at the Post
Office) were foiled, and Thackeray remained loyal to
his true and only vocation.

■ No sooner was Vanity Fair finished than he set to
work upon Pendennis} It was written under different
skies, and with varying fortune. Now, the author is
delighted with his work ; now, he finds it, " without
any manner of doubt, awfully stupid." The fear of
" Bradley, the printer, coming to dun him " is ever
before him, and once, as we know from the dedica-
tion, the progress of the book was interrupted by ill-
ness. But he finished it in 1850, " very tired," as he

' The first number of Pendennis was published in November,
1848. After the eleventh number (September, 1849) there was a
gap of three months, due to the author's illness, but the publication
was resumed in January, 1850, and in the following December the
last I'a double) number made its appearance. The book is appro-
priately dedicated to Dr. John Elliotson, who tended the author
through his illness, and " would take no other fee than thanks."

PENDENNIS 121

told his mother, "weary and solemn-minded." Irk-
some as the task seemed, it brought with it compen-
sations, for Thackeray was intensely interested in his
own creations, and while he was writing, Pendennis
and the world were for him one and the same.
While, on the one hand, he looked upon life with the
eyes of a book, on the other the personages of his
story were real and beyond his control. " I wonder
what will happen with Pendennis and Fanny," he
writes one day ; " - . . somehow it seems as if it
were true. I shall know more about them to-mor-
row." He cannot conceal his admiration for the
Major, and he is delighted to encounter a familiar
friend. " At the station," says he, " whom do you

think I found ? Miss G , who says she is

Blanche Amory, and I think she is Blanche Amory —
amiable at times, amusing, clever, and depraved."

Who Miss G was is immaterial, but Thackeray's

own comment upon the poet of Mes Larmes is at
once curious and just.

In structure and composition Pendennis differs little
from Vanity Fair, for though it is a novel with a
hero, it is still a novel without a plot. It has the
same motive as Tom "Jones, Gil Bias, or le Pere Goriot.
In other words, it describes the impact of an enter-
prising, adventurous youth upon the world. But
unlike the heroes of the other masterpieces I have
mentioned, Pendennis moves in a formal little circle,
not of his own choosing. His adventures are lim-
ited, not merely by his lack of courage, but by a nar-
row, ruthless convention of life. From the very first

122 THACKERAY

he is taken charge of by the tyrants of habit and cus-
tom. He is pushed along the common groove from
school to college, from college to London, until he
reaches the comfortable goal of fiction — a blameless
marriage. When Rastignac emerged from the hum-
ble boarding-house near the Pantheon, he was forti-
fied by the predatory philosophy of Vautrin to make
war upon society. Pendennis found a mentor more
circumspect than Rastignac's. His Vautrin was the
admirable Major, whose cynicism conceived nothing
worse than an entrance into the best houses and a
rich alliance.' But while Rastignac remains a tri-
umph of romantic portraiture, Pendennis ends as he
began, an intelligent, meritorious young gentleman.

The one generous adventure of his life, the adora-
tion of the Fotheringay, is properly represented as a
mere boyish folly, and it is difficult to believe sin-

' Compare, for instance, the worldly-wise counsels which the
Major administers to his nephew with the fierce exhortations of
Vautrin, whose famous address to Eugtee de Rastignac is the
perfection of cynicism. " Voilk le carrefour de la vie, jeune
homme," says he, " choississez. Vous avez deji choisi : vous etes
alle chez notre cousin de Beauseant, et vous y avez flairS le luxe.
Vous etes alle chez Madame de Restaud, et vous y avez flaire la
Parisienne. Ce jour-la, vous etes revenu avec un mot ecrit sur votre
front, et que j'ai bien su lire : Parvenir ! parvenir i tout prix^
' Bravo ! ' ai-je dit, • voili un gaillard qui me va.' II vous a fallu
de I'argent. Ou en prendre ? " That question is easily resolved ;
and if you set this cynical rhapsody of Vautrin side by side with
the Major's amiable approval of " a good name, good manners,
good wits," you will understand the difference not merely between
the talent of Balzac and the talent of Thackeray, but something of
the difference between France and England.

PENDENNIS

123

cerely in the episode of Fanny Bolton. A chance
meeting at Vauxhall, the ignition of a spark in a
childish heart — these are not the material of a
tragedy, or even of an embroilment. What is the
crisis, indeed, that could hang upon so slender a
thread of fate as a kiss innocently given or a word of
kindness spoken in a whisper ? The truth is, that
Thackeray dared not face the logic of his facts, and
his readers may be forgiven if they find the situation
incredible. Between Balzac and Thackeray, then,
there is a wide ocean of temperament and experi-
ence, and while Thackeray timidly hugs his shore,
Balzac dives into the deeps, unconscious of fear.
Le Pire Goriot is of universal significance. Penden-
nis, the book, is so severely English that it will
hardly cross the Channel. Pendennis, the hero, is not
merely an Englishman ; he is also a blurred reflection
of his author ; and it is not strange, therefore, that
both book and hero strike what Matthew Arnold
called a note of provincialism.

For Pendennis is in essence an autobiography. It
is, of course, an idle task to seek in the novel the
author's actual experience. Whether he borrowed
his own character or the character of a friend,
Thackeray liberally transformed it. He was content
to select a trait here, an episode there, keeping the
general effect of the picture true to its model. That
Pendennis was a reminiscence of himself he was
quite conscious. " Being entirely occupied with my
two new friends, JVIrs. Pendennis and her son Mr.
Arthur Pendennis," he wrote to Mrs. Brookfield, " I

124 THACKERAY

got up early again this morning, and was with them
more than two hours before breakfast. He is a very
good-natured and generous young fellow, and I begin
to like him considerably. I wonder whether he is
interesting to me from selfish reasons, and because I
fancy we resemble each other in many points."
Moreover, in loyalty to his own school and college,
Thackeray gave Pendennis the same education he
had himself enjoyed. Arthur, too, was at Grey
Friars' School, distinguished as neither a dunce nor a
scholar. He, too, devoured all the unprofitable litera-
ture that came in his way, and spent his pocket-money
upon tarts for himself and his friends. Being nat-
urally disposed to indolence, he cared for fighting as
little as for learning; but, on the other hand, he nei-
ther told lies nor bullied little boys.

Again, when he had passed through the ordeal of
love, Pendennis, like the author of his being, went to
Cambridge, and the chapters which describe Pen's
triumph and failure at the University are of Thack-
eray's best. There are many failures to prove how
difficult it is to paint a picture of university life.
Some remember their Alma Mater as the sad home
of a priggish scholarship, while others recall their
contemporaries as the riffrafF of bars and race-courses.
But Thackeray's sense of reality saved him from
either pitfall. He accomplished his delicate task
without exaggeration, and with not more than a spice
of sentimentality. His Mr. Bloundell-BIoundell
doesn't ring quite true ; but the others — even the
lordly, the extravagant, the admirable Pen himself —

PENDENNIS 125

are of the genuine metal. And how just is the rem-
iniscence evoked by " the old Oxbridge tracts " ! Is
it not in this spirit that one always looks back upon
the first precious days of freedom to think wildly or
to act foolishly ? " Here is Jack moaning with de-
spair and Byronic misanthropy, whose career at the
university was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is
Tom's daring essay in defence of suicide and of re-
publicanism in general, . . . Tom, who wears
the starchiest tie in all the diocese, and would go to
Smithfield rather than eat a breakfast on a Friday
in Lent." And, best of all, there is Bob, " who has
made a fortune in railway committees, bellowing out
with Tancred and Godfrey :

" ' On to the breach, ye soldiers of the "cross,
Scale the red wall and swim the choking foss.
Ye dauntless archers, twang your crossbows well ;
On bill and battle-axe and mangonel !
Ply battering-ram and hurtling catapult,
Jerusalem is ours — il Deus vult.' "

There is the true aspect of the University, mel-
lowed by a knowledge of the larger world. So, too,
when Thackeray brought Pendennis up to London,
he kept an eye upon his own experience. Pendennis,
like the author of his being, was as intimately at home
in Grub Street as in Baker Street or Carlton House
Terrace ; he, too, born to Tyburnia, strayed awhile
in the wilder province of Bohemia ; he, too, visited
the broken man of letters in jail, and himself knew
what it was to write for his bread. Moreover, the
London to which Pendennis came after his sojourn at

126 THACKERAY

Cambridge was in all respects the London of Thack-
eray's youth ; and the curious may find a clear proof of
Thaciceray's fidelity to truth in the files of " Baron "
Nicholson's forgotten journal, The Town, to name
but one source of corroboration. As sketched by
that amiable ruffian, London is a paradise of night-
saloons and " free-and-easies." The Coal Hole, over
which presided " the pleasant, agreeable Rhodes," was
already the rival of the more famous Evans's, where
old English ballads alternated with the improvisations
of Charles Sloman, " the great little Jew." ^ There
the nobs from the West End — and Pendennis among
them — would finish the evening more sedately begun
at ball or rout, and would even condescend to play
their part in the entertainment.

In such haunts as these, then, — haunts meet for
the midnight Apollo, — Thackeray sets many a scene
in his drama, and his sympathy with Rhodes and his
like is as plain as his understanding of them. No
writer, indeed, has depicted this strange chapter in the
history of manners with Thackeray's skill and veri-
similitude. To compare his treatment of the theme
with Nicholson's is to note the diff'erence between the
artist and the journalist. Where Thackeray presents
a picture, the " Baron " affects a desire to prove that
" vice rarely reigns in the human heart unaccompanied
by better feelings." This desire, to be sure, was uni-
versal in that age, and Thackeray was no stranger to
it. But the current literature of the day proves
Thackeray the least of many offenders, and we may be
' See above, p. 21.

PENDENNIS

127

frankly grateful to him for saving from oblivion an
institution long since dead and gone. To revive the
glories of Evans's and the Coal Hole, higher spirits
and a livelier talent would be necessary than we can
find to-day ; no more will " the great improvisatore "
touch off the newest comer in a neat couplet ; no
more will the brutality of " Sam Hall " affront the
Philistine. Yet who will say that in exchanging the
" free-and-easy " for the " marble hall " we have got
the better of the bargain ?

So with equal step Thackeray and Pendennis pace
the stones of London. But that which they achieve
is far less important than those whom they encounter
by the way. As we have said, Pendennis does not
depend upon its plot, and its single complication — the
blackmailing of Clavering by Altamont, and Blanche
Amory's legitimacy — seems a trifle out of tone. No,
Pendennis, like Vanity Fair, is eminent for a set of
characters, shrewdly observed and wittily drawn. In
one respect it shows an advance upon Vanity Fair;
it is more uniform ; it is not composed in so many
varying planes of caricature. Its dramatis personcs,
with few exceptions, belong to the same age, and are
drawn to the same scale. Yet once again Thackeray
shows his interest in eccentricity and rascaldom. The
best of his characters are not those who conform to
the standard of the copy-book heading. In other
words, he is more at home with the sinners than with
the saints, and at the head of them all stands the
incomparable Major, who, if he sinned, sinned in the
cause of worldly success and good breeding. The

128 THACKERAY

Major, in truth, is the most vital, as he is the most
entertaining, figure in the book. Amiable, heartless,
honourable, cunning, he epitomises in his character
and career some of the worst vices castigated in the
Book of Snobs. But, to prove that Thackeray the artist
is more sincere than Thackeray the moralist, he is
drawn with rare knowledge and insight. The world
in which he moves is narrow and select. Beyond the
confines of his own St. James's he knows nothing,
save a German Spa and half-a-dozen great houses.
The society which he affects is the best and the
worst. Marchionesses leave notes at his club ; the
young men like to walk with him down Pall Mall,
" for he touched his hat to everybody, and every other
man he met was a lord." On the other hand, he
does not disdain the little French parties which the
Marquis of Steyne gave at the Star and Garter, and
he is on terms of intimacy with that elderly buck
Lord Colchicum.

It is but natural, therefore, that he valued etiquette
more highly than polite letters, and that in his view
procedure was of greater import than morality. After
himself, he worshipped his family, which was but
another form of self. " My nephew marry a tragedy
queen ! " he exclaimed when he heard of Arthur's
entanglement. " Gracious mercy, people will laugh
at me so that 1 shall not dare show my head."
Wherefore, for his own sake as much as for his
nephew's, he declined the invitations of his exalted
friends, and reluctantly went to Fairoaks on his errand
of discretion. Here he behaved with his wonted

PENDENNIS 129

magnificence. " Why are there no such things as
lettres-de-cachet" he asked, " and a Bastille for young
fellows of family ? " And it was in this spirit that
he tackled the question of his nephew's brief mad-
ness. His mind was made up from the first. "The
issue shan't be marriage, my dear sister," said he.
" We're not going to have a Pendennis, the head of
the house, marry a strolling mountebank from a
booth." And he handled the afi^air with a fine tact ;
he went so far, for the sake of the house, as to laugh
at the pretensions of his own nephew ; and he treated
Costigan with a mixed contempt and cajolery which
did credit to the world in which he lived. Nor could
Thackeray have found better foils for the Major's
worldliness than his sister's mild indulgence and the
swaggering blackguardism of Captain Costigan ; and
it is no wonder that the Major came off from the en-
counter with flying colours.

Henceforth he plays Mentor to Arthur's Tele-
machus. As I have said, he is the Vautrin of the
drama; but his philosophy (it may be repeated) is
neither so daring nor so romantic as the p'renchman's.
The world which he would have his nephew conquer
is merely the world of his own narrow acquaintance,
where a knowledge of fashionable families is far more
important than courage. " My dear boy," says he,
" you cannot begin your genealogical studies too early ;
I wish to Heaven you would read in Debrett every
day." The prospect which he holds out to his
nephew is comfortable, if commonplace — a rich mar-
riage, Parliament, distinction. " Remember," he ob-

130 THACKERAY

serves with the genuine accent of sound counsel, —
" remember, it's as easy to marry a rich woman as a
poor woman : and a devilish deal pleasanter to sit
down to a good dinner than to a scrag of mutton in
lodgings. Make up your mind to that. A woman
with a jointure is a doosid deal easier a profession
than the law, let me tell you. Look out; I shall be
on the watch for you, and I shall die content, my boy,
if I can see you with a good lady-like wife, and a
good carriage and a good pair of horses, living in so-
ciety, and seeing your friends, like a gentleman."
That is an ideal of life, like another, and perhaps,
making an allowance for nationality, it is not very
different from Vautrin's own. Nor in this is there
any hint of insincerity. The ideal which the Major
holds up to others is ever before his own eyes. " I
am an old soldier, begad," he pleasantly remarks as
he rides in Sir Hugh Trumpington's brougham, " and
I learned in early life to make myself comfortable."

For him, in truth, society was a profession as well
as a cult. He studied his acquaintances, as other men
study law or theology. When the Duke gave the
Major a finger of a pipe-clayed glove to shake, the
Major was in high good-humour. " Yes, depend
upon it, my boy," thus he moralised ; " for a poor
man there is nothing like having good acquaintances.
Who were those men with whom you saw me in the
bow-window at Bays's ? Two were peers of the
realm. Hobanob will be a peer as soon as his grand-
uncle dies, and he has had his third seizure ; and of
the other four, not one has less than his seven thou-

PENDENNIS 131

sand a-year. . . . That is the benefit of know-
ing rich men; I dine for nothing, sir; I go into the
country, and I'm mounted for nothing. Other fel-
lows keep hounds and gamekeepers for me. Sic vos
non vobls, as we used to say at Grey Friars, hey .? I'm
of the opinion of my old friend Leech, of the Forty-
Fourth ; and a devilish shrewd fellow he was, as most
Scotchmen are. Gad, sir. Leech used to say he was
so poor that he couldn't afford to know a poor
man."

And so the Major went through life, neither toil-
ing nor spinning, arrayed in all the magnificence which
the best of tailors and an irreproachable valet could
compass. A touch of birth or fashion made the
whole world kin for him. When his nephew lived in
chambers with Warrington, he was easily consoled
with the thought, " Suffolk Warringtons ! I shouldn't
wonder, a good family," and he was even reconciled
to Pen's attack upon literature, remembering that
nowadays clever fellows got into the very best houses.
Even his ignorances were such as become a gentle-
man. When Pendennis told him he was plucked,
" I wonder you can look me in the face after such a
disgrace, sir," thunders the Major, " I wonder you
submitted to it as a gentleman," and asked in amaze
whether it was done in public. Yet for all that he is
a gentleman always, a gentleman kindly and shrewd,
whose worldly wisdom is at once genial and dignified.
Thackeray, moreover, drew his portrait with evident
sympathy. Once, it is true, he lectured him after his
wont. " Is this jaded and selfish worldling," he asks.

132 THACKERAY

" the lad who, a short while back, was ready to fling
away his worldly all, his hope, his ambition, his
chance of life for his love ? This is the man you are
proud of, old Pendennis." But old Pendennis es-
caped with less scolding than most, and Thackeray
did not hide his predilection. " My vanity," he told
Mrs. Brookfield, " would be to go through life as a
gentleman, as a Major Pendennis," and in this half-
humorous confession Thackeray was perhaps nearer
the truth than he thought.

Like master, like man, and the Major is admirably
matched in Morgan, the valet. Had that worthy
done nothing else than describe the Temple as " rather
a shy place," he would not have been created in vain.
But below-stairs, or at the " Wheel of Fortune," he
is as great an aristocrat as his master in another
sphere. Not only does he follow his master into " the
best houses " ; he has both made money and sur-
prised secrets. However, when he attempts black-
mail, he is no match for the Major, and he is speedily
forced to an abject surrender in a scene which is
among the best in the book. In his other descent
below-stairs, Thackeray is not so happy. Alcide
Mirobalant is on the one hand a concession to fash-
ion, on the other he is monstrously overdrawn. At
the time when Pendennis was written the world had
long been curious about cooks. Louis Eustache Ude
had won a place among the Fraserians, and though
many experts ridiculed the talent of this eminent sen-
timentalist, he nevertheless symbolised a prevailing
taste. In other words, gastronomy was the mode ;

PENDENNIS

133

man was defined as a " dining animal," and the com-
mon-places of Brillat-Savarin were deftly served up
by novelist and critic. Lord Lytton had already pan-
egyrised the cook — qu'un cuisinier est un mortel
divin ! — in a famous chapter of Pelham. In his most
approved style he had exclaimed, " By Lucullus, what
a visionary bechamelle ! " He had pronounced Gul-
oseton's chickens "worthy the honour of being
dressed." He had even compared the lusty luscious-
ness of a pear to the style of the old English poets.

But concerning cookery, as concerning many other
arts of life, the locus classicus is to be found in the
works of Disraeli. It is in Tancred that the artistry
of the cook is most wittily expressed, without the
bombast of Lytton or the caricature of Thackeray.
Leander and the Papa Prevost are drawn with the
proper touch and in the true colours. Being artists,
they are conscious of their high destiny, and it is not
surprising that they wither without appreciation.
Leander at Montacute Castle, with no message from
the Duke, is like a poet whose verses are unread and
unsung. " How can he compose," asks Prevost,
" when he is not appreciated .'' " That is the proper
spirit of the mock heroic; that is the quiet solemnity,
which gives to irony its sharpest, surest point ; and
Thackeray, in following the fashion, fell below the
excellence of his model.

For it was in frank competition with Leander that
Monsieur Alcide Mirobalant, " chef of the bouche
of Sir Clavering, Baronet," was drawn. And he is
not a success, because all his traits are exaggerated.

134 THACKERAY

He does not resemble a cook so much as the comic
Frenchman of convention. His costume is as
fantastic as himself, and is designed to excite laughter
rather than to convince you of his reality. You be-
lieve as little in the man himself as in his light green
frock, his crimson velvet waistcoat, his pantalon
ecossais, and the other appurtenances of his holiday
attire. His declaration of passion to the adorable
Blanche, made by means of the plats which she loved
best, is amusing enough, but it is a piece of frank
burlesque, suddenly introduced into a piece of
realism. Equally ludicrous is Mirobalant's encounter
with Pendennis at the Baymouth ball, and the ab-
surdity is heightened by the apology which Laura
forces Pendennis to make, and which proves that the
episode is taken seriously. In brief, Mirobalant is
out of tone, but he may be accepted as an interlude
of farce, as a specimen of that " comic relief,"
which our playwrights believe to be the essence of
drama.

But while Mirobalant fails, the Blanche of his
adoration is a little triumph of portraiture. She is as
pert a jade as ever deceived in life, or masqueraded in
fiction. The Chevalier Strong, whose hatred of her
; is unconcealed, describes her best. " Miss Amory,"
says he, " is a muse — Miss Amory is a mystery —
Miss Amory is a femme incomprhe." And with her
little airs and graces, with her little poems, with her
fierce and selfish temper, she is exquisitely superficial
and malicious. She is of the type about which
men flutter, and which women decry and contemn.

PENDENNIS

135

While Laura detects her hypocrisy in an instant, she
ensnares Pendennis with the deftest flattery, and only
transfers her love to the hapless Foker at the last
minute. When the cold, harsh world depreciates
her, she takes refuge in the little book bound in blue
velvet, with a gilt lock, and on it printed in gold the
title of " Mes Larmes." " Mes Larmes ! " she
murmurs, " isn't it a pretty title." But all is pretty
about her, her fair hair with its green reflections, her
dark wistful eyes, her little moues, and her dainty
frocks — all is pretty, indeed, except her devilry and
her cunning. No wonder the poor Baronet wishes
Missv was dead ; no wonder Ned Strong would like
to see her deep in a well, for, as Clavering admits,
" she turns all the house round in her quiet way, and
with her sentimental airs." But when she unmasks
her battery she is more than a match in mere world-
liness for the Major himself, and it is clear that
Thackeray drew her after life and with genuine de-
light.

Admirable, too, is Mr. Harry Foker, a reflection,
it is said, of one Archdeckne, long a familiar figure
in the clubs. Now, Foker is a downy cove, who
knows the time of day, and is willing to impart his
knowledge to his friends. In this peculiar quality of
downiness he is superior to the worthy brewer, his
father, or to his devoted mother, the exquisite Lady
Agnes. Safe from scrapes himself, he is ready with
sublime generosity to extricate others. This young
buck preaches to Pendennis in a strain which the
Major would have approved with all his heart. For

136 THACKERAY

his part he had done with Oxbridge. " Parley voo's
the ticket," says he ; " It'ly and that sort of thing."
But he doesn't like to leave Pendennis among the
Philistines. He urges him to eat dinners, not give
them ; to ride other men's horses ; and to keep clear
of gambling. " They'll beat you at it. Pen, my boy,
even if they play on the square," he urges; " which
I don't say they don't, nor which I don't say they do,
mind. But / wouldn't play with 'em. You're no
match for 'em. You ain't up to their weight. It's
like little Black Strap standing up to Tom Spring —
the Black's a pretty fighter, but, Law bless you, his
arm ain't long enough to touch Tom, — and I tell
you, you're going it with fellers beyond your weight."
Such is Foker's philosophy, and very sound it is.
But this downy young gentleman is always on the
spot, whether he is nursing a debauched headache, or
driving Miss Pinckney to Richmond, or attending
Ben Budgem's night at the Three-cornered Hat, or
simpering over Miss Blanche at the piano. He is
always on the spot, and Thackeray has drawn him,
big cigar, fancy waistcoat, large buttons and all, with
the fidelity which comes of intimate acquaintance and
perfect understanding.

The rest of the less reputable characters are
realised with equal skill — the Costigans, the Claver-
ings, and Strongs. Altamont is monstrous even for
his company, but the others are true enough to them-
selves and their purpose. Costigan is as nearly re-
lated to the kings of Ireland as was his ancestor,
Barry Lyndon, and he is sketched with the same

PENDENNIS

137

neatness and the same spice of malice which
Thackeray generally brings to the portraiture of
Irishmen. He was invented, as Thackeray said in a
paper entitled De Finibus, " as authors invent their
personages, out of scraps, heeltaps, odds and ends of
characters." But, though he was invented out of
scraps, Thackeray knew him so well, and his pride
of birth, and his love of brandy and idleness, and
his delight in his daughter's talent and marriage, that
when he encountered him in real life he recognised
him instantly.

" I was smoking in a tavern parlour one night," so
the author tells the story in De Finibus, " and this
Costigan came into the room alive, the very man :
the most remarkable resemblance of the printed
sketches of the man, of the rude drawings in which I
had depicted him. He had the same little coat, the
same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle
in that eye. 'Sir,' said I, knowing him to be an old
friend whom I had met in unknown regions — ' Sir,' I
said, ' may I offer you a glass of brandy-and-water ? '
'■ Bedad, ye may,' says he, ' and I'll sing ye a song tu.'
Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue. Of course
he had been in the army. . . . How had I come
to know him, to divine him ? Nothing shall convince
me that I have not seen that man in the world of
spirits." It may be left to the mystics to explain the
phenomenon. But the resemblance of the man in the
tavern to Costigan is a high tribute to Costigan's
human similitude. The resemblance explains also
the accusation often levelled at Thackeray of drawing

138 THACKERAY

too nearly after life. The champions of Catherine
Hayes took umbrage at a name. Five Irishmen
recognised themselves, without warrant, in the Mul-
ligan of Mrs. Perkins' Ball., and their anger was but
another proof of Thackeray's skill. His characters
suggested something which was not mere fiction,
something which was alive, and the guilty braggart
caught sight of his likeness, as in a mirror, and con-
fessed.

Upon a set of eccentric characters, then, Pendennis
establishes its claim to immortality. Unhappily the
more reputable personages in the drama do not inspire
the same admiration as Mr. Foker and the Major.
Arthur Pendennis himself, the young Marquis of
Fairoaks, is a coxcomb, and not a very fine coxcomb
either. He would have been none the worse material
for that had Thackeray frankly pictured him a prig as
he frankly pictured George Osborne a cad. But
Thackeray both displays his own sympathy for Pen-
dennis and demands yours. In the author's eyes Pen
is a good-natured, generous young fellow, and so no
doubt he is at times. On the other hand, he is — in
his hours — a portentous prig. The truth is, he is so
many things that he is neither consistent nor intelli-
gible. Though he is a young man about town, his
nights, you are given to understand, were " wild,"
not " wicked." He was " too lofty to stoop to a
vulgar intrigue," and " never could speak to one of
the sex but with respectful courtesy." His little pas-
sage with Fanny Bolton is so ludicrous that one won-
ders what all the pother is about. And Thackeray's

PENDENNIS 139

lack of courage not only spoils the character of Pen-
dennis, it weakens the motive of the book. You
cannot believe him a devil of a fellow, who has so
few sins to his account ; and the kindest thing to say
of him is that he is true, not to human ■-nature, but to
the British nature of the early 'Forties.

As to the two ladies, Helen Pendennis and Laura,
we prefer to believe that they belong to no age nor
clime. In Thackeray's representation they suggest
nothing save dulness and insipidity. They are not
so much women as bottles of tears, reverberating
phonographs of sobs. Their talk is like the sad twit-
tering of sparrows in a wintry garden, or the pit-a-pat
of rain upon the window. At the smallest excuse,
" the two women rush into each other's embraces,"
and while the mother is always " fond," Laura is ever
"affectionate and pure." Why this young woman
of sixteen, brought up in the seclusion of Fairoaks,
should be anything else than pure it is difBcult to sur-
mise. She was as pure, you are convinced, as the
white muslin frock, tied with a blue bow on the
shoulder, which she certainly wore. But it was the
fashion of the time to insist upon the obvious virtues,
which we now take for granted, and Laura or Flora
(as the Major called her) is essentially a thing not of
life but of fashion.

George Warrington, from the nobility of his char-
acter, must be classed with the two poor ladies,
though, of course, he is more substantial than they,
more closely compact of bone and muscle. He is
what is called nowadays a good all-round man, a Bo-

140 THACKERAY

hemian who is a gentleman, an athlete who is also a
scholar. " He had been one of the hardest livers and
hardest readers of his time at Oxbridge," says Thack-
eray, " where the name of Stunning Warrington was
yet famous for beating bargemen, pulling matches,
winning prizes, and drinking milk-punch." He is
one of those heroes to whom nothing comes amiss :
he can write, he can box, he can talk. In fact, he is
a mixture of Guy Livingstone and the Grub Street
hack. The worst is that Thackeray has overdone his
love of squalor ; he has put him in an atmosphere of
tobacco, which is too thick for belief. The gentle-
man who wipes his wrist across his beard after a
draught of ale smacks of the fairy story, and the
dilapidation of his chambers is an unnecessary smudge
upon the portrait. His carpet is full of holes, you
are told, his Plato is battered, his tables are stained
with the circles of many pint-pots, he has scarcely
" an article of furniture that has not been in the
wars." Now, since there is no particular merit in
squalor, and since Warrington is drawn as a grave
and serious scholar, as well as a gentleman, many of
these traits contradict themselves, and he appears less
a man than a catalogue of " sterling " qualities. His
contempt of ambition, his secret consciousness of a
broken life, his candid honesty, his suppression of
himself in anonymous journalism, are excellent virtues
and well depicted. But a finer subtlety of detail
might have made the character at once credible and
consistent. As he is, he is not for a moment com-
parable to the Major, and if, as is said, he is drawn

PENDENNIS

141

from George Stovin Venables, he assuredly does not
flatter his model.

But Pendennis had another claim, besides its char-
acters, to public recognition ; it aroused the public
curiosity upon another ground. It presented a picture
of the literary world, as Thackeray knew it, which is
neither pleasant nor unjustified. Grub Street was
never the most amiable quarter of the town, and
Thackeray described it with the contempt of one who
had strayed within its precincts in his own despite.
As has already been said, he was no native of Bo-
hemia, nor was he ever acclimatised to its heavy
atmosphere. But he knew it all the better, because
he looked upon it with the unprejudiced eye of an
outsider. Clearly, then, the experience of Pendennis
is in all respects his own, and the chapters in which
the foundation of The Pall Mall Gazette is set forth
are intimately autobiographical. Pendennis, in fact,
entered the world of letters by the same gate as
Thackeray, and for the same reasons. He, too,
wished to fill a depleted purse ; he, too, had a natural
gift, which could easily be turned into current coin of
the realm ; and when Arthur modestly tells Warring-
ton that " he cannot fly on his wing," Warrington
replies in words which accurately describe Thackeray
himself, " But you can on your own, my boy, which
is lighter and soars higher, perhaps." Poor Pen, de-
lighted at the praise, thinks of his " Ariadne in
Naxos," and Warrington instantly brings him down
to earth with a burst of laughter. He tells him it is
useless for him, an absurd little tomtit, to set up for a

142 THACKERAY

Pindar, but he candidly allows that " he can write a
magazine article, and turn out a pretty copy of
verses."

In other words. Pen has the same talent which dis-
tinguished his author when he joined the staff of
Eraser's Magazine. And Pendennis rushes into Grub
Street with the delightful enthusiasm of inexperience
which the author of his being knew so intimately.
In a few pages the romance of the literary calling is
artfully displayed. In Pen's eyes all is poetry and
delight. What a career, to emulate "the sense, the
satire, the scholarship " of his friend Warrington !
Shandon, again, is a man of genius, infamously com-
pelled by the avarice of the publishers to languish in
the Fleet. The knights of the pen are chivalrous,
brilliant, and honest, every one of them. Pen carries
his manuscripts to the oiBce " with a great deal of
bustle and pleasure ; such as a man feels at the out-
set of his literary career, when to see himself in print
is still a novel sensation." His first set of verses are
" screwed out " with the pleasure and excitement
which are the privilege of youth. When the first
parcel of books come for review from The Pall Mall
Gazette., he "had never been so delighted in his life :
his hand trembled as he cut the string of the packet,
and beheld within a smart set of new neat calico-
bound books — travels, and novels, ^d poems." It is
all fresh as sunshine, no shadow of drudgery lies
across his path as Pendennis, having sported his oak,
sits down to read and to review.

Moreover, the Press was not yet common enough

PENDKNNIS 143

to have lost its mystery. Optimists still believed in
its mission and influence. Even Warrington, the
soft-hearted cynic, was amazed at the trade which he
followed. " Look at that, Pen," he said, as they
passed a newspaper office in the Strand. " There she
is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her
ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her cour-
iers upon every road. Her officers march along with
armies, and her envoys walk into statesmen's cabinets.
They are ubiquitous ? Yonder journal has an agent,
at this minute, giving bribes at Madrid ; and another
inspecting the price of potatoes in Covent Garden.
Look ! here comes the Foreign Express galloping in.
They will be able to give news to Downing Street to-
morrow : funds will rise or fall, fortunes be made or
lost; Lord B. will get up, and, holding the paper in
his hand, and seeing the noble Marquis in his place,
will make a great speech ; and — Mr. Doolan will be
called away from his supper at the Back Kitchen ; for
he is foreign sub-editor, and sees the mail on the
newspaper sheet before he goes to his own."

Thus with perfect candour Thackeray said what
might be said in praise of the world of letters. While
in Pendennis he pictured in vivid colours the enthusi-
asm of his youth, he made Warrington the mouth-
piece of his maturer opinion and harsher criticism.
The literary medal had, and has always had, a reverse,
and Thackeray did not hesitate to show it. His
Paternoster Row is given over to sordid rivalries and
eager toadyism. His Bungays and Bacons are as
ignorant as they are avaricious ; and Captain Shandon

144 THACKERAY

is not a dignified example of literary genius. The
famous scene in the Fleet Prison, wherein the Captain
reads the prospectus of The Pall Mall Gaxette, is a
piece of satire which Thackeray did not often sur-
pass. It was to the gentlemen of England that the
imprisoned Captain made his appeal. He observed
from the secure retreat of the Fleet Prison that " the
good institutions, which had made our country glori-
ous, and the name of English Gentleman the proudest
in the world, were left without defence." He re-
ferred in moving words to the plain of Waterloo, and
on remarking how his venerable friend Bungay was
affected, declared that he had used the Duke and the
battle of Waterloo a hundred times — and " never
knew the Duke to fail." From friends the Captain
turned lightly to foes, dismissed in a sentence certain
"hireling advocates," and declared that they must not
" have Grub Street publishing Gazettes from White-
hall." Whereupon Bungay wagged his dull head and
says, " For a slashing article, there's nobody like the
Capting — no-obody like him." So with a flourish
the Captain addressed himself " to the higher circles
of Society : we care not to disown it — The Pall Mall
Gazette is written by gentlemen for gentlemen ; its
conductors speak to the classes in which they live and
were born." And Bungay awoke from a second
snooze, which held him as securely as sleep held
Jonathan Wild at the ministrations of the prison
chaplain.

Still more bitter is the satire of Bungay's dinner-
party, whose table-talk sounds like a travesty of

PENDENNIS 145

Swift's " Polite Conversation." The entertainment
is as vulgar and fatuous as possible. Thackeray spares
nothing and nobody. Miss Bunion's vast appetite,
Mr. Wagg's bad puns, Wenham's snobbery, the
Captain's drunkenness, Percy Popjoy's ambition to be
taken for a literary man. Captain Sumph's ' silly stories
of Byron — are all ridiculed without stint or pity. The
conversation never sparkles for an instant. It is silly
and sordid from soup to dessert, and none of those
who "cut mutton" with Bungay proves worth his
salt. The satire is legitimate, but Thackeray's com-
ment is hardly just. " Not one word about litera-
ture," says he, " had been said during the whole
course of the night." And why, indeed, should this
word have been spoken ? Not only is the objection
unnecessary ; it weakens Thackeray's argument, since
there is no more reason why men of letters should
discuss literature with one another than why lawyers
should dispute of law, or parsons of theology. The
literary world is indicted in Pendennis for taking itself
and its craft too seriously, for claiming exemption
from the duties imposed by honest citizenship. Yet
when once it declares itself indifferent to its calling,
Thackeray is ready with a reproach.

But Thackeray did not frame his indictment against
journalists and publishers without warrant. He de-
scribed Grub Street, as he knew it, with scrupulous

' It is scarcely worth while to trace all Bungay's guests to their
origins, but Sumph was doubtless suggested by Captain Medwin,
of the 24th Light Dragoons, who published (in 1824) a set of
foolish Conversations with Lord Byron.

146 THACKERAY

accuracy. And it was not a very pleasant place. A
strange mixture of sentimentality and recrimination,
it inclined on the one side to insipidity, on the other
to violence. There v^as room within its borders both
for Bludyer and Popjoy : indeed it may be said that
Popjoy was Bludyer's best excuse. But such as they
were, Thackeray understood them, and their fellows,
intimately, and, since he had spent his life among
them, this knowledge is not surprising. He had
edited papers; he had contributed to them from at
home and abroad ; he had done the work of a special
correspondent ; he had for many years cut a figure in
the magazines, and in Pendennis he resumes his ex-
perience. Not a few of his characters are drawn
direct from life. Bungay, for instance, is an unamia-
ble portrait of Colborn the publisher, while Archer,
the quidnunc, whose advice is always wanted at the
Palace, and whose taste for cold beef the Duke him-
self consults, is none other than Tom Hill of The
Monthly Mirror, whom Theodore Hook painted as
Hull in Gilbert Gurney.

But by far the most famous portrait in the gallery
is Captain Shandon, for which sat Maginn, the
" bright broken " Irishman. It is not unkind, this
portrait, for the Captain is as gentle a ruffian as ever
wrote a slashing article or spent his last shilling on a
drink. There are many touches, too, which heighten
the verisimilitude, and make the intention certain.
The Doctor's knowledge of the Fleet was as intimate
as the Captain's, and the prospectus of The Pall Mall
Gazette, pompously composed within the walls of a

PENDENNIS 147

prison, reminds us of The Tobias Correspondence,
wherein Maginn, from the security of a garret in
Wych Street, set forth "the whole art and mystery
of writing a paper." Nevertheless, the portrait does
not do perfect justice to the Doctor. For Maginn,
when his shillelah was laid aside, was a real man
of letters, and a finished scholar to boot. There
was, of course, something lacking in his character ;
and his ambition, if indeed he knew the meaning
of the word, never kept pace with his attain-
ments. For some years he concealed his name,
even from Blackwood ; and when he descended into
the pit of London journalism he speedily won a
reputation for what was worst in him. The savage
mangier of Grantley Berkeley, for instance, captured
a fame which was long withheld from the scholar
who turned Chevy Chase into Latin, and Homer into
the metre of a border ballad.

The truth is, facility and an inborn love of fight-
ing destroyed him. He could turn his hand so easily
to anything, prose or verse, Latin or English, that he
never did justice to his own talent. He once told
Blackwood that there was no chance of " his turning
author of anything beyond a spelling-book," and
though now and again he wrote a book for money,
with characteristic prodigality he left the best of his
work buried in Eraser's Magazine, where his essays
on Shakespeare and Rabelais and his brilliant versions
of Lucian remain to attest his sound judgment and
his happy hand. Nor should it be forgotten that so
fastidious a critic as Matthew Arnold praised his

148 THACKERAY

Homeric ballads, and that Lockhart loved and served
him to the end. Unfortunately, his vices always
eclipsed his virtues in the popular eye ; his reckless
character soon got the better of his conspicuous
talent ; and when his collapse was complete, he
sacrificed principle for a pittance, and would write
for one side ai easily as for the other. But such as
he was, he belonged to his time, and Thackeray found
a full warrant as well in his gifts as in his misfortunes
for the portrait of Captain Shandon.

However, no sooner were those chapters of Pen-
dennis published which describe the literary world,
than the Press made a characteristic outcry against
Thackeray. The author was accused by The Chron-
icle of " fostering a baneful prejudice against literary
men." The Examiner^ with miraculous insight, de-
tected not merely the sin, but its motive. It charged
Thackeray with " condescending to caricature (as is
too often his habit) his literary fellow-labourers, in
order to pay court to the non-literary class." ^ Now,
such criticism as this is manifestly absurd. As
Thackeray himself said in reply, " If every charac-
ter in a story is to represent a class, not an individual,
novels would become impossible." This reply is un-

1 Yet Thackeray was born a man of letters, and he was con-
scious of his birthright. " The first literary man I ever met was
Croly,'' he told Elwin. " I was a lad of seventeen, on the top of
a coach, going to Cambridge. Somebody pointed Croly out to me.
I had read Salathiel at sixteen, and thought it divine. I turned
back and gazed at him. The person who pointed him out to me,
said, ' I see that lad is fated.' He knew it by the way I gazed
after a literary man."

PENDENNIS 149

answerable and sufficient, and Thackeray, who was
accused again and again of attacking a profession or
a nation through an individual, made use of it many
times.

But in answer to The Chronicle and Examiner he
was not content with the obvious refutation. He set
forth with energy and eloquence his views upon the
dignity of literature. It was a subject upon which he
always wrote with wisdom and conviction, and all
men of letters owe him a debt of gratitude. He
looked upon his profession without cant or humbug;
he claimed for it neither favour nor privilege. " Men
of letters," said he, " had best silently assume that
they are as good as any other gentlemen." He de-
nied that the " non-literary class " delighted in the
degradation of authors, who, on the contrary, won by
their pen friends, sympathy, applause. He declares,
with perfect truth, that no man loses his social rank,
whatever it may be, by the practice of letters. With
equal truth he points out that many a man claims a
place in the world by his writings, which he did not
inherit, and which his writings alone could give him.

But, in return, he insists that a man of letters
should not be excused by his talent from performing
the common duties of citizenship. In other words,
he confesses a " prejudice against running into debt
and drunkenness and disorderly life." Nowadays,
when literature has entered upon a career of extreme
respectability, this prejudice is unnecessary. But in
the days of Bludyer and the Captain no one who re-
spected his craft could do less than impose upon his

150 THACKERAY

fellow-craftsmen the obligations of order and honesty.
Moreover, Thackeray was not unduly censorious in
his judgment of his colleagues. While he would
have them preserve a high standard of life, he would
not condemn them too hardly if they failed. His
sympathy with Shandon is clearly expressed, and he
was no less kind to the model who sat for Shandon's
portrait. "I have carried money," said he, "and
from a noble brother man-of-letters, to some one not
unlike Shandon in prison, and have watched the beau-
tiful devotion of his wife in that place." But he was
never of those who believed that a servile imitation
of Shelley's or Byron's supposed vices was the short
cut to genius, and the simple, honest views which he
held he set forth with honest simplicity.

Nor, for the rest, would he cherish any illusions
concerning his craft. He puts the strongest case
against the professors of literature in the mouth of
Warrington, and that sturdy hack does not spare the
defendants. " A good deal of undeserved compassion
has been thrown away upon what is called a book-
seller's drudge," says Warrington ; and when Pen in
the inexperienced enthusiasm of youth protests against
the cynicism bred of solitary pipes and ale, " a fiddle-
stick about men of genius," cries Warrington, — " 1
deny that there are so many geniuses as people who
whimper about the fate of men of letters assert they
are." And in his own person Thackeray supports
Warrington's view. In a review of Lytton's Memoir
of Laman Blanchard^ he declines to pity what he
deems a fortunate career. He recognises that Blanch-

PENDENNIS 151

ard followed the profession he loved best, and found
his delight not only in the scanty reward of his work,
but in the mere practice of literature. This attitude
is surely more reasonable than Lytton's posture of
sorrow and regret. After all, Blanchard's talent was
slender enough, and doubtless he put it to the best
possible use in the literature of the day.

Indeed, Thackeray's main argument that the man
of letters must obey the general law of life and con-
duct is irrefragable, and it is only when he would ap-
ply the tenets of the Manchester school to literature
that you disagree with him. Literature is not a mere
matter of supply and demand. Some men, at any
rate, write because they have something to say, and
are undeterred by lack of appreciation. Thackeray
himself did not renounce his craft because he failed to
find readers. For ten years he wrote assiduously for
the magazines, often without success. Barry Lyndon
was a sad failure when it appeared in the pages of
Regina, and Vanity Fair itself was within an ace of
being suppressed at the fifth number for lack of sub-
scribers. But Thackeray neither hesitated nor de-
spaired. He knew in his heart that what he " sup-
plied " was superior to the popular " demand " ; he
knew also that reputation was far better than what he
afterwards called it, " the cant of our trade " ; and
loyally he worked to win it. And his work was not
thrown away, for reputation, conferred by fellow-
craftsmen, is the assurance of self-respect, to sacrifice
which is the peculiar sin of literature.

Nevertheless, if Thackeray erred at all in the judg-

152 THACKERAY

ment of his profession, he erred upon the right side.
That which he wrote seems less than half true to-day,
because the conditions of literary life are changed.
Men of letters long ago deserted Bohemia to live
upon the outskirts of Belgravia or within the sacred
precincts of Tyburnia. They no longer address an
audience of gentlemen from the Fleet, nor do they
write masterpieces while hiding from their creditors.
They pay their tailors, and they refrain from drink,
and so far they conform to the standard which Thack-
eray set up for them. But with their prosperity they
have developed new vices, which no Thackeray has
arisen to castigate. They are pompous ; they take
themselves and their profession all too gravely ; and,
worse still, they hunger and thirst after notoriety. It
is not legitimate reputation which keeps them awake
— that is no longer the cant of their trade. They are
sleeplessly eager for the advertisement not of their
works, but of themselves. They are unhappy when
they are taken for mere men, like lawyers or stock-
brokers. They would, if they could, go through life
with the stamp of their art upon them. It is hard to
say which Thackeray would have preferred, his own
age or ours. But it is certain that the chapters de-
voted to the literary profession claimed an audience
for Pendennis which would have been obstinately in-
different to its easy unaffected style, its pictures of
contemporary manners, and its half-a-dozen vividly
drawn characters. Perhaps the author's own com-
ment upon the book is the fairest. " I lit upon a very
stupid part, I'm sorry to say," he wrote to Mrs.

PENDENNIS 153

Brookfield, after reading some back numbers of Pen-
dennis, " and yet how well written it is ! What a
shame the author don't write a complete good book ! "
A shame, indeed, which presently the author did his
best to remove.

CHAPTER VI

LECTURES AND LECTURING. ESMOND

In 1850, when the last number of Pendennis was
given to the world, Thackeray's reputation was firmly
assured. He was, in fact, the one rival near the
throne of Dickens, and the zealous readers of the
day enrolled themselves under one banner or the
other, according to temperament. A year later, elec-
tion to the Athenaeum Club set a seal upon his fame,
and it should be remembered to Croker's credit that
Thackeray, as has been said, owed this honour in
some measure to the advocacy of Mr. Wenham.
But in those days fame was not easily convertible into
money, and men of letters were not apt to make a
fortune with a single book. To enrich his family,
therefore, Thackeray resolved upon a course of lec-
tures. Within four years he travelled from end to
end of England, and paid two visits to America. It
was a task which was always irksome to him, yet he
performed it with excellent taste and tact ; and, after
the first display at Willis's Rooms, success was
assured. He never concealed the fatigue which the
long journeys and the oft-recurring lectures inflicted
upon him. He went to America, he wrote to his
daughter, " not because I like it, but because it
is right that I should secure some money against my
'54

LECTURES AND LECTURING 155

death for your poor mother and you two girls."
Again, on his second visit across the Atlantic, " Oh,
how weary, weary I am of this lecturing," he com-
plained.

But once having taken the resolution, he did his
utmost to fit himself for the task. A month before
the first lecture, he tried the great room at Willis's,
and, as he told Mrs. Brookfield — " recited part of
the multiplication-table to a waiter at the opposite
end, so as to try my voice. He said he could hear
perfectly, and I dare say he could, but the thoughts
somehow swell and amplify with that high-pitched
voice and elaborate distinctness." And instantly
Thackeray discerns, after his wont, how " orators
become humbugs " ; nevertheless, he found this " dip
into a life new to him " interesting, and he acquired
to perfection what Motley called a " light-in-hand
manner." His first lecture, given on May 22, 185 1,
has been described by many an appreciative pen.
" It was given at Willis's Rooms," wrote Charlotte
Bronte, " where the Almack's balls are held — a great
painted and gilded saloon, with long sofas for benches.
The audience was said to be the cream of London
society, and it looked so. I did not at all expect
that the great lecturer would know me or notice me
under these circumstances, with admiring duchesses
and countesses seated in rows before him; but he
met me as I entered, shook hands, took me to his
mother, whom I had not before seen, and introduced
me."

But Charlotte Bronte could not help seeing that

156 THACKERAY

her idol had feet of clay, and presently she set
forth her view in more critical terms. " I could not
always coincide with the sentiments expressed," she
wrote, " or the opinions broached ; but I admired
the gentlemanlike ease, the quiet humour, the taste,
the talent, and the originality of the lecturer." It is
impossible to recover the tone of a lecturer, or to
echo the accent of a dead actor. When the voice is
still, we can only place a humiliating reliance on press
notices, and these agree so far as to give a vague
impression of Thackeray's manner. In speaking, as
in writing, he esteemed ease above eloquence. As
in his books he shunned rhetoric, so in his lectures
he avoided elaboration.^ He regarded his audience
as friends with whom he was conversing, rather than
as strangers before whom he was making a display,
and he easily achieved the success at which he
aimed.

The matter of his lectures was no less character-

' An article published in The New York Evening Post, and
printed in The Letters of W. M. Thackeray, sums up in flattering
terms the general opinion. " His elocution," says The Post,
" surprised those who had derived their impressions from the
English journals. His voice is a superb tenor, and possesses that
pathetic tremble which is so effective, in what is called emotive
eloquence, while his delivery was as well suited to the communica-
tion he had to make as could well have been imagined. His
enunciation is perfect. Every word he uttered might have been
heard in the remotest quarters of the room, yet he scarcely lifted
his voice above a colloquial tone. The most striking feature in
his whole manner was the utter absence of affectation of any
kind."

LECTURES AND LECTURING I57

istic than their manner. In choosing The English
Humourists of the Eighteenth Century^ as the subject
of his first course, he did but follow the natural
bent of his mind. Had he been a man of leisure
he would, he says, have devoted himself to the study
of the past, and for some years he was resolved to
compose a serious history of Queen Anne and her
Court. For such a task he had many qualifications.
He possessed the imaginative faculty of living in an-
other age than his own ; he could see with a quick
artistic eye the trappings of dead and gone periods.
Despite his love of progress and modern ideas, he
submitted easily to the dictates of fancy, and could
understand the outward life of any age to which his
desultory reading carried him. When he was writing
his lectures on the Humourists, he declared that the
eighteenth century absorbed him to the exclusion of
the nineteenth. But while he had the imagination,
without which history cannot be written, he lacked
the no less indispensable faculty of criticism. He
refused to recognise the tyranny of facts. Such men
as he encountered in the past must conform not with
the truth of their careers but with his vision of them.
In other words, the novelist always got the better of
the historian. His Swift, Pope, and Sterne corre-
spond loosely with their originals. They are the
creatures of fiction, coloured by prejudice, and trans-
formed by fancy.

' The Humourists, first delivered in 1 85 1, were published in the
shape of a book two years later.

158 THACKERAY

The truth is that Thackeray, in his historical es-
says, considered the facts last of all. He began with
a purely personal view, to which words and deeds
were alike subservient. Thus in his intense convic-
tion he forgot that the humourists of the eighteenth
century were men like himself, whose qualities
should not elude a vigilant research. In his eyes
they were so many Esmonds or Warringtons, who,
so long as they did no violence to their century,
might aptly illustrate the lecturer's cynicism or em-
bellish his sentimentality. That he did not esteem
resemblance essential to a biographical portrait is evi-
dent on every page of his Lectures. But, that there
might be no doubt, he explains in a letter addressed
to M. Forgues "the history of Addison." Now,
M. Forgues had declared in a French paper, without
the slightest shadow of justice, that Thackeray had
praised Addison " to curry favour with the English
aristocracy." Thackeray naturally resented so gro-
tesque a calumny, and in self-defence he laid bare the
genesis of Addison's character. He confessed that
he had no personal liking for the man. But he ad-
mired his humour, and more than his humour he ad-
mired his conduct of life. " Rich or poor," says
he, " he was an upright, honest, dignified gentle-
man ; " and he praised him " as one of our profes-
sion," to silence " the absurd outcry about neglected
men of genius." This absurd outcry Thackeray
had done his best to silence elsewhere, and he might
have looked at Addison with no other object than
faithfully to paint his character. But that would

LECTURES AND LECTURING 159

have been alien to his method, and he was content
that Addison, like the rest, should point a moral and
illustrate a theory.

His first lecture was devoted to Swift, and if we
have a right to demand verisimilitude, the Dean's
portrait is by far the worst in the gallery. The pic-
ture devised by Thackeray's imagination was vile,
and traits were ingeniously sought to justify it. The
motive which shaped his Addison we know; he does
not reveal the motive of his Swift. It is a pity, since
this piece of fierce injustice demands an excuse.
Not only is the essay packed with inaccuracies ; the
truth is always twisted to a sinister end. He begins
by asking an irrelevant question. " Would we,"
says he, " have liked to live with him ? " With re-
spect, it may be pointed out that our preference has
nothing to do with the character and achievements of
Swift. But it is indubitably true that the best of
Swift's contemporaries did like to live with him, and
felt honoured in his acquaintance. For monstrous
though he appear to Thackeray, he had the genius of
friendship before all his fellows. The great men of
the time loved and reverenced him. Addison and
Pope, Harley and Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot and Gay
were faithful to the end of their lives or his. Bol-
ingbroke was as little sentimental as Swift. While
both were giants in intelligence, neither the one nor
the other anticipated the Victorian emotion. Yet
wrote Bolingbroke in 1729: "I loved you almost
twenty years ago." And in the same year the same
statesman addresses his friend in a strain of singular

l60 THACKERAY

eloquence. "While my mind," says he, "grows
daily more independent of the world, and feels less
need of leaning on external objects, the ideas of
friendship return oftener : they busy me, they warm
me more. Is it that we grow more tender as the
moment of our great separation approaches ? Or is
it that they who are to live together in another state
(for vera amicitia non nisi inter bonos) begin to feel
strongly that divine sympathy which is to be the
great band of their future society ? " Would Bol-
ingbroke have written so fine a sentence to one who
was nothing but scorn, bitterness, rage, and obscenity ?
No : vera amicitia non nisi inter bonos., and inter bonos
both Bolingbroke and Swift take a lofty place.

So, too, the good Arbuthnot cherished the friend-
ship of Swift. " I can assure you," he wrote to the
Dean a few months before his death, — " I can assure
you, with great truth, that none of your friends or
acquaintance has a more warm heart towards you
than myself. I am going out of this troublesome
world ; and you among the rest of my friends shall
have my last prayers and good wishes." So, too.
Pope, from whom, says Thackeray without warrant.
Swift " slunk away," remained unto the end Swift's
friend and admirer. But such records of friendship
mean nothing to Thackeray, who seems to have
made up his mind about Swift before he wrote his
biography. He is quite sure, in defiance of facts,
that Swift's companionship and conversation were
without charm. He toadied his superiors, we are
told, this man who never stooped to flatter ; he bul-

LECTURES AND LECTURING l6l

lied and insulted his inferiors ; he quailed before you
if you met him like a man, and then " watched for
you in a sewer, and came out to assail you with a
coward's blow and a dirty bludgeon."

It need scarce be said that for these libels Thack-
eray quotes no authority ; there is not an episode in
Swift's career to justify one of them; and the inap-
posite use of the word " sewer " is sufficient proof of
prejudice. Even when Thackeray does admit Swift's
kindness or devotion, he at the same time suggests
that the virtue is prompted by baseness. He insulted
a man as he served him, says the biographer, and
flung his benefactions into poor men's faces. Did
Pope harbour this unkind thought when Swift col-
lected a thousand guineas for him ? or young Harri-
son, whom he befriended ? Was this the view of
the fifty friends, for whom, while he failed, to ad-
vance himself, he found preferment ? Did Parnell,
or Gay, or Congreve, or Rowe, all of whom owed
places to him, look upon their benefactor with this
acrimony ? Was it in this spirit that the Irish
people remembered its champion ? Assuredly not.
In truth, no man of his time received the simple
worship which Ireland laid at the feet of Swift.
When he returned to Dublin from London in 1726
bonfires were lit, and the church-bells rang out peals
of welcome. Once upon a time Walpole was
minded to arrest the Dean, and he was asked if he
had ten thousand men to spare, for the job could not
be done with less. This monster, too, who insulted
where he gave, distributed a third of his income, and

1 62 THACKERAY

won from his dependents, whom he was said to in-
sult, a frank and lasting affection.

Again, because Swift, who was, in Bolingbroke's
phrase, " a hypocrite reversed," did not advertise to
his guests his performance of family devotions,
Thackeray belabours him with charges of insincerity.
But it is clear that in his critic's eye he could do no
right. He was guilty of " boisterous servility,"
though we know as little to whom he was servile as
how servility to any man can be boisterous. In the
same spirit Thackeray delights to paint his sojourn in
Temple's house in the blackest colours, as a time of
insult and oppression. Yet he was familiar enough
with the period to recognise that the relation of client
to patron was honourable and honourably understood.
When Swift wrote to Temple for a certificate of
morals and learning, he did but employ the conven-
tional terms of his age. Yet this is how a simple
action strikes Thackeray : " I don't know anything
more melancholy than the letter to Temple, in which,
after having broke from his bondage, the poor wretch
crouches piteously towards his cage again, and depre-
cates his master's anger." It is not the poor wretch's
letter that is melancholy ; it is the biographer's com-
ment.

^ It is plain, therefore, that Thackeray entertained a
■kind of personal hatred against Swift. When open
charges fail him, he is content with a hinted sugges-
tion of evil. He declares that Vanessa was not
.•merely a woman of taste and spirit, but " a fortune
too," as though the man, who indignantly refused the

LECTURES AND LECTURING 163

money which Harley proffered him, and who never
begged a favour for himself, had his eye upon Va-
nessa's gold. On another page, he blames him for
changing sides, yet he should have known that Swift
was the most consistent politician of his time. How-
ever, it is idle to pursue the critic's inaccuracies,
though it may be worth while to attempt an explana-
tion of his acrimony. In the first place, I think,
Thackeray disliked Swift, because Swift did not take
that genial, worldly view of life, which was suitable
to the haunter of clubs and drawing-rooms. The
Dean of St. Patrick's was a misanthrope, who loved
his friends, and delighted in stealthy benevolence.
But he was a misanthrope for all that. A man, who
in his own phrase " understood not what was love,"
and who by ill-health and isolation was driven back
upon his own intelligence, he had the leisure to con-
template, and the brain to measure the follies of the
human race. In contempt he is Olympian. He
gave no quarter, and he expected none. He laid bare
human folly, and he has suffered for his courageous
indiscretion. But he did not make his attacks upon
his fellows from mere savagery. He never put pen
to paper save in scorn of stupidity, or with a fixed
desire to reform abuses. And the easy-going man
about town not unnaturally saddled his back with all the
sins and all the absurdities that he castigated in others.
Worse still, Swift was an ironist, and, like all ironists,
he has been consistently vilified and misunderstood.
Yet surely the author of Barry Lyndon should have
understood this subtle artifice. But no ; like the bit-

164 THACKERAY

terest Philistine, he imputes to Swift himself all the
sins which Swift denounces in others. He follows
the familiar critic in applying an infamously false
meaning to Swift's Modest Proposal. This tract, as
all the world might know, was written in a mood of
savage despair against the wrongs of Ireland. Out-
wardly humorous, it is aflame with a passion of sin-
cerity. Every sentence it contains is a cry of hope-
less misery, a detestation of suffering which " tore
the writer's heart." And Thackeray can say no
more than that neither Dick Steele, nor Goldsmith,
nor Fielding could have written it. Surely they could
not, for the lofty passion which inspires it was not
theirs. " Not one of these but melts at the thoughts
of childhood, fondles and caresses it," says Thack-
eray. " Mr. Dean has no such softness, and enters
the nursery with the tread and gaiety of an ogre."
No, Mr. Dean has no such softness, when the starv-
ing are to be fed and bitter wrongs clamour for
redress. He is not content to " fondle and caress " ;
he would also feed and succour. True, Thackeray is
not quite so foolish as a modern critic, who, having
read the passage in which " a very knowing Amer-
ican " declares " that a young healthy child, well
nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing,
and wholesome food," charges Dean Swift with ig-
norance or contempt of our American Colonies. But
Thackeray's imputation of cannibalism is little less
gross, and it proves that, well as he knew the period,
he had not chosen to read aright the works of Jona-
than Swift.

LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 65

What a strange perversion of mind it is, which
ascribes to the eager champion of right the very
wrongs which he eloquently condemns ! Yet in
Thackeray's opinion even Gulliver must be taken
literally, and judged by the offences in whose dispraise
it was written. " As for the humour and conduct of
this famous fable," he writes, " I suppose there is no
person who reads but must admire ; as for the moral,
I think it is horrible, shameful, blasphemous ; and
giant and great as this Dean is, I say we should hoot
him." And hoot him he does with the greatest heart-
iness. Yet I doubt whether " hooting " is the critic's
most useful weapon, and I am sure that so highly ac-
complished an ironist as Thackeray would have been
wiser to pierce the mystery of an adept incomparably
greater than himself, than to join in the general and
foolish " hoot " which for two centuries has been
heard in the Dean's dispraise.

I have dwelt at length upon Thackeray's portrait
of Swift, because, while it is typical of his method, it
presents with sad lucidity the worst vices of that
method. What the method was Thackeray clearly
explains in a question put to his audience. " In com-
mon life," he asks in the lecture on Steele, " don't
you often judge and misjudge a man's whole conduct,
setting out from a wrong impression ? " To this
question the lecturer himself could have given but one
answer. He misjudged his Humourists continually,
viewing them all with an air of sorrowful patronage,
as roysterers who fell far short of the standard set up
in 1850. This one he reproaches with having sat too

1 66 THACKERAY

long at Button's with Mr. Addison ; that other dis-
pleases him because he has soiled his lace-ruffles with
Harry Fielding's claret. He seems to confuse a love
of genial company with habitual drunkenness, apply-
ing to his victims the process of a cross-examining
lawyer. " You were caught revelling last night in a
tavern, sir," you can hear him say ; " that is how you
squander your time, and waste your talents." It is
always " Poor Dick Steele," " poor Harry Fielding,"
and " poor Congreve." Yet these men were not
homunculi that they should be fitted with nicknames
of contempt. They ask no condescension, and de-
serve no pity. Surely Congreve, who yields in good
fortune and accomplishment to none of his contem-
poraries, was " poor " neither in character nor esteem ?
And to the libel that " Harry " Fielding was stained
with ink and wine, a life of prodigious and productive
energy is the best answer. The worst of nicknames
is that they easily overpower truth and research. Mr.
Lecky^ complains with perfect justice that Steele has
always " received hard measures from modern critics,"
for which injustice Thackeray is largely to blame.
What boots it that " poor Dick " was a keen soldier,
an indefatigable writer, an ardent politician .? It is far
more difficult to discover his good qualities than to
recognise the conventional portrait of a "tipsy cham-
pion," and so Steele takes his place with the rest in
an immemorial tavern.

Even where he approves, Thackeray damps his
approval with prejudice. His admiration of Field-

' England in the Eighteenth Century, i. i86.

LECTURES AND LECTURING 167

ing's novels is so frank and generous that you regret
the more deeply his inapposite qualification. As he
hoots at Swift for the last part of Gulliver, so he
thinks " Fielding's evident liking and admiration for
Mr. Jones show that the great humourist's moral
sense was blunted by his life, and that, here in Art
and Ethics, there is a great error." Whereon he
proceeds to belabour Mr. Thomas Jones, who, says
he, " would not rob a church, but that is all," and to
wonder which is the worse enemy to society — Jones
or Blifil. By this twisted sentiment he spoils what
might and should have been a noble panegyric. In
another place he is so thickly befogged by an austere
morality as to be unjust even to Pope, the god of his
devoutest idolatry. "I wish Addison could have
loved Pope better," says he. " The best satire that
ever has been penned would never have been written
then, and one of the best characters the world ever
knew would have been without flaw." It is hard to
say which is the stranger perversity — to see Pope's
character without a flaw, or to wish the Dunciad un-
written. Thackeray hails and salutes the achieving
genius ; he " does homage to the pen of a hero " ;
yet he contemplates with regret the hero's crowning
achievement, and having painted Swift all black, he
paints Pope all white. And thus it is that the didactic
spirit always fails to interpret the past. It informs
even his favourite Addison with a kind of inhumanity.
It is not easy to take an interest in one " who stooped
to put himself on a level with most men," who " must
have been one of the finest gentlemen the world ever

1 68 THACKERAY

saw," and who, as he is drawn by Thackeray, might
have sat for his portrait in the gallery of Snobs.

Nevertheless, The English Humourists contain many
excellent passages not merely of description but of
criticism. Though Thackeray rates Sterne soundly
for outraging the code of the nineteenth century, he
sums up his talent in a phrase which only just misses
the truth. "The man is a great jester," says he,
" not a great humourist." Again, while he pities
Congreve, he has a shrewdly just understanding of
his comedy, to which he attributes " a jargon of its
own quite unlike life, a sort of moral of its own quite
unlike life too." But it is in the painting of manners
that his real gift lies. Scattered up and down his
lectures there are pages of description, distinguished
by an ease and grace which are Thackeray's own.
With how light a hand does he sketch the world of
The Spectator and revivify the London of our ances-
tors ! How deftly he resumes the England which
Hogarth saw and drew ! Nor does he anywhere
nrove this faculty more conspicuously than in his
Four Georges, a curious medley of sermonising and
memoirs. While on the one hand each monarch is
the text for a moral discourse, the letters and journals
of each reign most pleasantly adorn the tale. It is
no " drum-and-trumpet " history that he aspires to
write. "We are not the Historic Muse," says he,
"but her ladyship's attendant, tale-bearer, valet de
chambre, for whom no man is a hero." So he has
much to say of Bath and its visitors, but very little of
the American Rebellion ; so he describes the life of a

LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 69

German Court with excellent humour, while he is
silent of campaigns and changing ministries. This
view of history is in perfect consonance with his tal-
ent, and to their purpose the lectures on the Four
Georges are admirably adapted. To-day they excite
no controversy ; they set forth no original views ; but
at the time of their delivery their author was absurdly
charged with disloyalty, and it is difficult to discern
what sentiment it was of national pride or prejudice
that he outraged.

The chief merit of the lectures is their style.
Composed for the lecture-hall, they appeal to the ear
rather than to the eye. The cadence of the prose is
nicely devised to claim and to hold the attention. It
displays at their best the variety, the ease, the care-
lessness, which we expect from Thackeray. Seldom
rhetorical, and never pompous, the lectures resemble
conversation rather than oratory, and quite apart from
the opinions of which they are the vehicle they gave
an intelligible pleasure to many audiences. It was,
indeed, with a keen sense of the theatre that Thack-
eray sought and found his effects. There is but one
— the attack upon Swift — that is monotonous in scope
and expression. In the rest grave and gay are cun-
ningly mixed; even the tragedy of George III is
pleasantly relieved by a sketch of George Selwyn and
his circle. From the point of view of the platform
this relief was happily contrived, since the most
sympathetic audience cannot easily spend an hour
with the same emotion. But when we have done our
utmost to imagine the effect which their author's

I/O THACKERAY

voice and gesture gave to them, we cannot but re-
member that truth is the essence of biography, and
that the lectures on the Humourists are the worst blot
upon Thackeray's literary reputation.

The lectures were first given in London between
May and July, 1851. Three months later Thackeray
sailed for America, to find a new world and warm-
hearted friends. Wherever he went, north or south,
he was enthusiastically received, and no doubt it was
the hospitality of the place which deprived us of an-
other Sketchbook. The picturesque reporter was al-
ways alive in Thackeray, and, one is sure, he was
eager to record his impressions. But the spirit of
gratitude counselled silence, and though Thackeray's
judgment in the matter is sound, we may still regret
that the artist did not overcome the man. Neverthe-
less, the letters addressed to his friends do something
to make up the deficiency, and it is easy to recover
Thackeray's appreciation of America. Life was as
rapid in New York fifty years ago as it is said to be
to-day, and Thackeray was speedily caught up in the
whirl. " I hardly know what is said," he wrote, —
" am thinking of something else, nothing definite,
with an irrepressible longing to be in motion." The
noise and rattle of the street appall him. " Broadway
is miles upon miles long," he tells Mrs. Brookfield,
" a rush of life such as I have never seen ; not so full
as the Strand, but so rapid. The houses are always
being torn down and built up again, the railroad cars
drive slap into the midst of the city. There are bar-
ricades and scaffoldings banging everywhere. . . .

LECTURES AND LECTURING I7I

Nobody is quiet here, no more am I. The rush and
restlessness please me, and I like, for a little, the
dash of the stream." For every city he has an apt
comparison or a shrewd character. Washington re-
minds him of Wiesbaden — " there are politics and
gaieties straggling all over it." Boston he finds like
Edinburgh — " a vast amount of Toryism and donnish-
ness everywhere"; while the company of New York
is in his eyes the simplest and least pretentious. " It
suffices," says he, " that a man should keep a fine
house, give parties, and have a daughter, to get all the
world to him." But much as he delighted in the
keen air, the splendour, and the generosity of the
North, he felt himself more intimately at home in the
South, where life was as quiet and sluggish as in
Kensington. He was happiest at New Orleans,
where " the sweet kind French tongue is spoken in
the shops." Despite his inborn Radicalism, he pro-
fessed no horror at slavery. " The negroes don't
shock me," he wrote in a letter, " or excite my com-
passionate feelings at all ; they are so grotesque and
happy that I can't cry over them." Some years later,
in a " Roundabout Paper " called A Mississippi Bubble^
he bore a willing testimony to the " curious gaiety "
of the American negroes. " How they sang," he
exclaims ; " how they laughed and grinned ; how
they scraped, bowed, and complimented you and each
other." But for domestic purposes slavery seemed to
him " the dearest institution that can be devised."
He declared that in a Southern city fifteen negroes
did " the work which John, the cook, the housemaid,

lya THACKERAY

and the help do perfectly in your own comfortable
London house." Indeed, comfort and happiness
made an easy conquest of political prejudice, and he
found all the ways of the South excellent. At a
tavern in Pontchartrain he had a bouillabaisse, worthy
of Marseilles, worthy of the Rue Neuve des Petits
Champs, which he himself celebrated in a ballad, and
everywhere flowed Medoc, good, superabundant, and
nothing to pay. How then should he, with his sin-
cere love of France, withhold admiration from the
Sunny South, still French in its luxury and abandon-
ment ? "As for New Orleans, in spring-time," sc
he rhapsodises, — "just when the orchards were flush-
ing over with peach-blossoms, and the sweet herbs
came to flavour the juleps — it seemed to me the city
of the world where you can eat and drink the most
and suffer the least." So when the war came be-
tween the North and South, Thackeray's sympathies
followed his heart, and " the abstraction of the two
Southern Commissioners from under our flag " in-
spired half-a-dozen pages of righteous indignation —
On Half a -Loaf- — rare in the works of Thackeray.
In brief, Thackeray's two journeys to America — he
revisited it in 1855 with The Four Georges — were dis-
turbed by nothing else than the fatigue and drudgery
of lecturing ; he brought home with him both fame
and money ; he had been appreciated by the people
and by the press — save by Boston, which found him
a snob, and by the Irish, who remembered Catherine
Hayes ; and he had stored his head, as we shall
presently see, with the material of another novel.

LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 73

But the lectures did something else than fill Thack-
eray's pocket. As his Sketchbook held the raw ma-
terial of much admirable ficticm, so The English
Humourists were the wisest possible preparation for
the writing of Esmond. He did but translate into the
form of a novel the material which had already served
to amuse the distinguished audiences of Willis's
Rooms. Written in 1852, the story was published as
its author set sail for America. Indeed, a copy was
put into his hands at the very moment of starting. It
was the first, and it remained the only, book of which
Thackeray wrote the last page before the first was
printed. In other words, it was given to the world
not in parts but in three complete volumes, and it is
not surprising that it is^ better composed and more
closely consistent than any other of his works. Now,
Esmond is a deliberate attempt to reconstruct the past
in woFd, in fact, in feeling. The scene is laid in the
England of Queen Anne, and Thackeray puts his
curious knowledge of the {)eriod to the best advantage.
But he is never dominated by history ; as in the Lec-
tures, so in Esmond., it is the novelist who always
keeps the upper hand. Nor does he indicate his
period by any trick of phrase or artifice of diction.
His style is no affair of old trappings, made in War-
dour Street. You will search his pages in vain for
strange words or strangely constructed sentences. It
is true that he makes a few concessions to an ancient
fashion of spelling : he writes Peterborow, for in-
stance, and Bruxelles ; but for the rest he gives a
very liberal interpretation to archaeology. How,

174 THACKERAY

then, does he produce the effect of another century ?
Merely by keeping his style at a higher level than it
usually attains. From beginning to end he writes
with a restraint which you will vainly seek in Pen-
dennis. He has thrown over the story a veil of
solemnity, through which his personages appear far
away like the distant shapes of another age. The
critic who declared that there is no page of Esmond
but might have been written by a contemporary of
Queen Anne was manifestly deceived. Examine the
text narrowly, and you will find both words and
phrases essentially modern. Indeed, it is the cadence
rather than the phrase that is of the eighteenth cen-
tury, and Thackeray's ear seldom misled him. In
other words, the author of Esmond has reproduced the_
effect, not the actual language, of the past, an achieve- „
ment at once more subtle and convincing than the
ransacking of some Gradus ad Parnassum for musty
names and otiose epithets.

The truth is, Thackeray's knowledge was profound
enough to be held in check. He had not crammed
the period up in a night to answer a popular demand.
There was no need for him to cloak a too obvious
ignorance with a parade of hastily acquired knowledge.
He did not attain local colour, after the fashion of
to-day, by admitting nothing into his novel that was
not obsolete. The heroes of modern romance do not
live in a real world ; they are ticketed in a museum
of antiquity ; they make love beneath trees whose
branches are haunted by stuffed birds ; the very words
they use belong not to human speech, but to a time-

LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 75

worn phrase-book. But Thackeray's method, far
happier than that of his successors, was also an indi-
rect reproof to those of his contemporaries who pur-
sued the art of historical fiction. He swept away at
a stroke all the conventions of G. P. R. James and
his school, of Bulwer and Harrison Ainsworth. In
Esmond you will find none of the catch-phrases, once
so popular. He does not tell you that " as dawn was
breaking a solitary horseman might be seen " and the
rest of it. The best of his characters are real men
and women, although they belong to the past, and it
might be said that the shining merit of Esmond was
its naturalness. At the same time, while Thackeray
is not enslaved by archasology, he makes the period
clear by a thousand light and incidental touches.
When Esmond writes his verses to Gloriana, " Have
you never read them ? " he asks. " They were
thought pretty poems, and attributed by some to Mr.
Prior." And so, while he scrupulously avoids pom-
pous description and fine writing, he creates an atmos-
phere at once consistent and just.

When, in Vanity Fair^ Thackeray chose a great
historical setting for his characters, he made no at-
tempt to introduce Napoleon or Wellington upon the
mimic scene. He allowed his readers to hear no
more than the echo of the guns which swept the plain
of Waterloo. In Esmond he was less wisely coun-
selled, and though the temptation to let Steele, Addi-
son, and the others speak for themselves was strong,
the novel would have been all the better had he re-
sisted it. He had sketched these personages, for good

176 THACKERAY

or evil, in his Lectures, and there he might have left
them to the judgment of posterity. But he must
needs ask them to play their part in the drama of Es-
mond; and it may be said that his characters are never
further from reality than w^hen they bear real names.
Nowf, if a novelist admits famous men into his
romance, he lays upon himself a double burden. For
the famous men must not only be picturesque and
consistent vv^ith the creatures of the writer's imagina-
tion — they must also be consistent with their own
history. That is to say, the author's fancy is, or
should be, hampered by truth, and the difficulty of the
problem is seen by the rarity of its solution. The
invention of imaginary characters carries with it no
such responsibility : to attempt an artistic presentation
of historical facts is doubly dangerous, because not
only does it control the author's imagination, but it
admits the reader into the workshop. The material
being known, the treatment of it can be more nar-
rowly scrutinised ; and dramatis persona bearing the
names of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison challenge
a criticism which Tom Smith and John Brown es-
cape. Thackeray, being a man of letters, has suc-
ceeded in a difficult task far better than the most of
his rivals. The heroes whom he borrows from real
life are never ridiculous. Though they often speak
with a voice which is not their own, their accent is
not inhuman, and even if you forget their names, you
might still deem them men. Nevertheless the author
is not at his ease with them. They neither move nor
speak with the naturalness which distinguishes Es-

LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 77

mond and Castlewood, and whenever they appear
they enwrap the story in another atmosphere.

The positive errors may be passed over lightly. It
is superfluous, for instance, to ask why Thackeray
should have dressed up Prue Steele in the garb of
Mrs. Malaprop, or why he should insist that Roger
Sterne was an Irishman. Nor need we do more than
refer to the repeated and monstrous outrage upon
Jonathan Swift. ^ Let us take Richard Steele and
Joseph Addison, who are drawn with the deepest
sympathy and the greatest elaboration. They are
both a trifle bibulous. Dick the Scholar always " im-
parts a strong perfume of burnt sack along with his
caress," and Addison drinks too deeply of my Lord
Halifax's burgundy. Again, they both speak like
books. Steele quotes copiously from his own Toilers^
and Addison cannot keep off the subject of his own
poems. And since men of letters have a life and
character apart from their printed works, this restric-
tion indicates a certain timidity in Thackeray's treat-
ment. For the rest, they are both amiable fellows,

' Doctor Swift is represented in Esmond as morose in temper
and violent in manners. He is also, for this occasion, a wanton
friglitener of children, so that he recalls more closely than ever the
Marquis of Steyne, who, it will be remembered, terrified Becky's
boy when he met him on the stairs.

^ Steele tells Esmond that he " drummed at his father's coffin,"
and he tells the same tale in The Tatler, No. 181 : " I remember
I went into the room where his body lay, and my mother sat
weeping alone by it. I had my battledore in my hand, and fell
a-beating the coffin, and calling Papa ; for, I know not how, I had
some slight idea he was locked up there."

lyS THACKERAY

even though they do some violence to their own char-
acters. They are bound together by that tie of
schoolboy loyalty which united Lamb and Coleridge,
and which Thackeray illustrated again and again.
Steele is a pleasant trifler, even when sober ; Addison
is not guiltless of pomposity even in his cups. The
scene wherein Esmond visited Addison at his lodging,
pictured the famous battle, and " drew the river on
the table aliquo mero" is admirably managed ; but the
dinner of the wits is as forced as Mr. Bungay's party,
and Esmond is never at its best when these miracles
of wit and learning are on the stage. However,
Thackeray himself realised their subordination ; he
knew that they were merely incidental to the action —
mere painted trappings in the background ; and he
makes it clear that his essential interest is in his own
characters. Had he suppressed all his great men, his
own story would still have been complete.

But there is one personage, the great Duke of
Marlborough, whom Thackeray has. sketched with
peculiar rancour, and against whom, in the person of
Esmond, he brings the most fantastic charges. It is
unnecessary to say that the portrait is inconsistent
with history as with itself. The Duke, indeed, as
Thackeray paints him, is no man but a monster, a
mere epitome of the vices, a proper pendant in
inconsequent ferocity to the Dean of St. Patrick's,
painted by the same hand. Being Commander-in-
Chief, he traitorously accepts bribes from the
French king, and loses battles that he may fill
his own pocket. His personal sins are worse even

LECTURES AND LECTURING lyg

than those which sully his public reputation. In
cowardice and hypocrisy he almost outdoes Swift him-
self. " He would cringe to a shoeblack," we are told,
" as he would flatter a minister or monarch ; be
haughty, be humble, threaten, repent, weep, grasp
your hand (or stab you whenever he saw occasion)."
These words are strangely applied to a hero, at whose
feet all Europe knelt, and who never cringed to man
or woman save to Sarah, his own implacable Duchess.
Nor is this the worst. The Duke lied, we are told,
cheated fond women, and robbed poor beggars of
halfpence. And these charges are brought not by the
villain of the piece, but by Esmond himself, who is
not merely the hero of the romance, but who may,
without injustice, be accepted as the vehicle of Thack-
eray's own opinion.

Of course a writer of fiction is not upon oath : he
may handle history with a certain licence ; but he
oversteps his privilege when he paints white black,
and breathes the very soul of meanness into a hero or
a patriot. This is not the place to celebrate the serene
intelligence, the supreme mastery of the great Com-
mander, who never fought a battle which he did not
win, who never besieged a city which he did not take,
who was as great in diplomacy as in arms, and who,
in Chesterfield's phrase, " possessed the graces in the
highest degree, not to say engrossed them." What
Marlborough was and what he achieved stand in let-
ters of gold upon the scroll of history. But we may
try to discover the reason for Thackeray's perverse
hatred. Now, Thackeray failed as a historian, be-

l8o THACKERAY

cause he always carried the prejudices of his own age
back into the past. He judged the heroes of a dead
century as though they were contemporary with him-
self and amenable to the same discipline. And one
of his prejudices was a dislike of success. He
was no hero-worshipper, attracted by dignity of man-
ner or grandeur of achievement. To him Louis XIV
was old " Square-Toes," and he found it possible to
imagine the Duke of Marlborough pilfering from a
beggar. Speaking in praise of the Duke of Berwick,
he says " fire and genius were given to baser^men " ;
and as it is not greatness but virtue which he admires,
he is persuaded to suspect genius, where'er it be
found.

But there was another reason why Thackeray
should have looked with displeasure upon Marl-
borough. General Webb, the conqueror of Wynen-
dael, was of his kindred, and having given Esmond a
brief for the General, Thackeray bade him plead
Webb's cause with all the energy of a violent
partisan. Now, a novel is not the best place for
polemics of this kind, and the controversy rudely
interrupts the serene course of Esmond. Neverthe-
less, Thackeray has contrived an amusing portrait of
General Webb, the heau sabreur with a grievance ;
and though, as he says, he does not love the stately
Muse of History, he has sketched the battle of
Wynendael with spirit and accuracy. The General,
" as Paris handsome and as Hector brave," is neither
a monster nor a caricature. He is just the foolish,
vain, genial ruffian that he was in real life. Thack-

LECTURES AND LECTURING l8l

eray makes no attempt to palliate his devotion to the
bottle or his rancorous hatred for the Duke. He
represents him as a reckless hero, impatient of
discipline and contemptuous of his superior's prowess.
And General Webb does not cut a very glorious
figure when he comes home, to brag in his cups of
the valiant deeds he did on the battle-field. In truth
he well deserves the comment, put by Thackeray into
St. John's mouth : " II est fatiguant avec sa trompette
de Wynendael." But he is the excuse for one ex-
cellently dramatic scene : the generals are dining with
Prince Eugene, when The London Gazette arrives, and
reveals the truth that General Webb's name is
omitted from the despatch. 'Tis Marlborough's one
appearance upon the stage, and Thackeray, as
though conscious of his villain's greatness, puts but
two phrases in his mouth. " There's some mistake,
my dear General Webb," says he, as he notes the
omission. And when Webb, with unpardonable
insolence, hands him The Gazette on his sword's
point, " Take it," says the Duke to his Master of
the Horse. Not even Thackeray dare make the
great Duke ridiculous upon the scene ; and this
reticence is some atonement for an infamous portrait.
But when Thackeray deserts the great ones of his-
tory for the personages of his own creation, there is
no fumbling nor faltering. In none of his books
does he keep so firm a grasp upon his characters as in
Esmond, which is as consistent in portraiture as it is
in style and effect. Nor was the task which he set
himself a light one. Not only is the scene laid in

1 82 THACKERAY

the England of Oueen Anne, but the action covers
many years, and the actors grow up under the
reader's gaze. Yet they are never false either to
their time or to themselves. What Esmond was,
when he first came to Castlewood, so he remained
until the last chapter, when his dear mistress's " eyes
of meek surrender yield to his respectful importunity."
He may not realise an ideal of all that is noble in
mankind. Some may detect in him the signs of a
nascent priggishness. Some may object that now and
again he resembles the author of his being too nearly
to be a true Augustan, — that his essentially modem
tirade upon the horrors of war, for instance, belongs
more intimately to Thackeray himself rhari :; a. soldier
of the eighteenth century. (Perhaps :: wis not for
nothing that Esmond, when he went zj Ci.tibridsie,
kept in Thackeray's own rooms, " i- --z-t grsat court
close by the gate.") Nevertheless re is a man of
blood and bone, who acts always ir. i;;:rd with his
own qualities. And in his dear mistre-ss he Ls well
matched. Lady Castlewood, an odd mixture of
caprice and devotion, of kindliness and anger, is
always the same and always herself. She, also, has
certain traits which we could dispense with in our
friends. She is almost as lachrymose as Mrs. Pen-
dennis ! She carries devotion too far, when she savs
to Esmond : " Let me kneel and worship vou." But
our preferences do not affect the truth of an ex-
quisite portrait, subtly conceived and finely drawn.

Again, the main theme of the book is treated with
the utmost delicacy. The transference of a man's

LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 83

love from daughter to mother is not a sympathetic
motive from romance. But Thackeray insists so
gravely upon Esmond's admiration and my Lady's
gratitude, that her surrender is not surprising, is even
inevitable. Mrs. Beatrix is not so successful. She,
indeed, does not come into her own, until she appears
in later life as Madame de Bernstein. Her caprices
are too vain for belief; her rejections too heartless.
Yet how^ picturesquely she is brought upon the
scene ! Who will ever forget her descent of the
stairs, and the scarlet glint of her stocking ? How
splendid, too, is Esmond's enthusiasm, when he sees
her again on his return from the wars ! He had left
her a girl ; he now gazes upon " a woman whose
eyes are fire, whose look is love, whose voice is the
sweetest love-song, whose shape is perfect symmetry,
health, decision, activity, whose foot as it plants itself
upon the ground is firm but flexible, and whose mo-
tion, whether rapid or slow, is always perfect grace —
agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen — now melting,
now imperious, now sarcastic — there is no single
movement of hers but is beautiful." What wonder
that, as he thought of her, he felt young again, "re-
membering a paragon ! "

But if Beatrix is a picturesque apparition rather
than a real woman, the world of Castlewood, through
which she walks a magnificent shadow, is admirably
depicted. The vague background of rebellion and
Jesuitry gives an air of added gaiety and peace to the
gay or tranquil inhabitants. My Lord Castlewood
himself is one of those warm-hearted, foolish, shift-

184 THACKERAY

less gentlemen whom Thackeray knew so well how
to draw. He is a Rawdon Crawley, more happily
mated, and when the crisis of his destiny arrives he
bears himself, as did Rawdon, like a man. Nothing
could be better than his conduct of the duel with
Lord Mohun, a duel most artfully composed from the
records of the time. Nor is the son, Francis the
Younger, unworthy his brave, spendthrift, debonair
father. Though he is as vain as his sister, his vanity
is tempered by an amiable disposition. " I know my
place," he tells Esmond. " I'm not proud ; I am
simply Francis James, Viscount Castlewood in the
peerage of Ireland." He is not clever, but he has
what the old Dowager calls the bd air. Mr. Steele
hits him off in a line. " The lad looks good things,"
says he, "and his laugh lights up a conversation as
much as ten repartees from Mr. Congreve." And
while the principal actors in the drama are well un-
derstood and well drawn, Esmond is singularly free
from those stock-characters with which few novelists
can dispense. True, the Jesuit Holt, with his strange
comings and goings, his secret hiding-places, and his
inaccurate information, is a type rather than a man.
True, also, the old Marchioness, the wicked Dowager
of Chelsey, is but Miss Crawley artfully disguised,
and more thickly coated with paint. But, when all
deductions are made, Thackeray has achieved a
success granted to few novelists besides Sir Walter
Scott : he has peopled an unreal world with real men
and women, for though the age is Anne's, Esmond
and my Lady and Frank Castlewood are human

LECTURES AND LECTURING 1 85

enough to have lived at any time and under any
sky.

But it is not merely for its characters that we
esteem Esmond^ nor for its many passages of dignified,
even elevated, prose. The book w'\\\ ever be mem-
orable also for one or tvi^o scenes of haunting beauty,
or dramatic intensity. Who can ever forget Es-
mond's visit to Walcote after his return from Vigo ?
It is in Winchester Cathedral that he sees my Lady
Castlewood and Frank after his estrangement, bring-
ing back w^ith him, in Tom Tusher's phrase,
" Gaditanian laurels." " And Harry's coming home
to supper. Huzzay ! huzzay ! " cries my lord.
" Mother, I shall run home and bid Beatrix put her
ribands on. Beatrix is a maid of honour, Henry.
Such a fine set-up minx ! " The passage expresses
the sentiment, not the sentimentality, of home-com-
ing, writhout a word too much, without a note falsely
struck. Still better is the last chapter of all, wherein
Esmond and the young lord pursue the Prince to
Castlewood. These dozen pages are, I think,
Thackeray's highest achievement. The three men
are perfectly realised — Esmond dignified and austere,
as becomes the head of the house; Frank chivalrous
and impulsive, like the sound-hearted boy he is; and
his Majesty, when once his rage is mastered, every
inch a king. " Eh, bien, Vicomte," says the young
Prince, who was a boy, and a French boy, " il ne
nous reste qu'un chose a faire : embrassons nous."
It is a brave picture, bravely painted, without a stroke
awry, without a superfluous touch.

l86 THACKERAY

Since Esmond many hundreds (or is it thousands ?)
of historical novels have been published ; yet Esmoncfs
supremacy is still unchallenged. The author's own
opinion of the book changed with his temper. One
day he finds it " clever, but also stupid, and no mis-
take "; another, he wishes "the new novel was not
so grand and melancholy " ; and when he contem-
plated it in all the bravery of its three volumes,
" Esmond" he wrote, " looks very stately and hand-
some in print, and bore as he is, I think he will do
me credit." Thackeray's prediction has been ful-
filled. Esmond did him infinite credit, and came
nearest to being " the complete good book " which,
said he, it was a shame the author didn't write.

CHAPTER VII

THE NEWCOMES A PARLIAMENTARY ELECTION

The Newcomes ' was published to a chorus of
applause. The Press, of whatever temper and com-
plexion, received it in respectful admiration. " This
is Mr. Thackeray's masterpiece," said the old-
fashioned ^arterly, " as it is undoubtedly one of the
masterpieces of English fiction." The Oxford and
Cambridge Magazine^ the brand-new " organ of the
pre-Raphaelites, was no less emphatic, declaring The
Newcomes " the masterpiece of all novel-writing," and
numbering its author " among the great naturalists of
all time." Since 1855 the word "naturalist" has
borne many a heavy burden. It has supported the
dullest researches of M. Zola and his followers. It
has been inscribed upon the banner of those who be-
lieve that nothing is true save the abnormal, and
properly enough it has fallen into disrepute. But in
the mouth of the pre-Raphaelites it was a term of
adulation. They believe that all nature should be as
meticulously observed and as carefully described as the
foregrounds of their own works, and in calling
Thackeray a " naturalist," they did but share with

^ The A^ewcomes : JMevioirs of a most respectable Fajtiily, edited
by Arthur Pendennis, Esq. ; published in twenty-four monthly
numbers from October, 1853, to August, 1855.

187

y

l88 THACKERAY

him their own glory. Nor was the term wholly mis-
applied. In a sense, completely opposite to that
which it has since attained, it fits Thackeray closely
enough. So far as he looked upon the common
aspects of life, so far as he did not travel beyond his
own experience, Thackeray was a true naturalist.

The reader will vainly seek hairbreadth escapes or
curiosities of vice in the pages of The Newcomes,
which is so close to nature as to contain nothing ab-
normal. It was this perfect correspondence with the
average knowledge of life which partly explains the
book's popularity. But there is another reason why
The Newcomes should have found favour in the
world's eye. It seemed Mr. Thackeray's master-
piece, because it was most characteristic of his talent
and prejudices. It was, so to say, Pendennh carried
to a higher power, and it was acceptable to all those
who thought that Esmond was a rude interruption to
the author's real work. In other words, the thick-
and-thin admirers of Thackeray found in The New-
comes precisely what they expected, and found it in
fuller measure. Here was the same easy style of
writing which distinguished Vanity Fair and Penden-
nis, the same easy treatment of great personages, the
same liberal mixture of over-sweet honey and too-
bitter gall. But in half a century the unessential has
been winnowed from that which matters, and we may
,look upon what appeared " the masterpiece of all
novel-writing" with a less partial eye.

The Newcomes is a comedy conducted, for the most
part, in defiance of the comic spirit. Instead of

THE NEWCOMES 189

sketching a serious situation, and demonstrating with
a laugh its inherent comedy, the author too often puts
his characters into a situation of comedy and proves
that it is fit for nothing else than a sermon. If this
be a " natural " book, our fathers, like Coleridge,
must have never done anything but preach. The
Nevjcomes is long — in its newest edition it covers
more than eight hundred pages — yet if you took
away all the trite essays upon morality, all the exhor-
tations to good conduct, all the tearful deplorations of
villainy, the trouble of reading would be halved, and
the pleasure doubled. The most trivial episode in the
book is an excuse for a moving discourse, and while
the virtues of some actors are exaggerated, the vil-
lainies of others are monstrously overdone.

Like so many optimists, who fondly believe in the
perfectibility of the human race, Thackeray had a
touching faith in deep and manifold wickedness. It
is thus that he describes a punter at Baden : "That
man, so calm and well-bred, with a string of orders
on his breast, so well dressed, with such white hands,
has stabbed trusting hearts ; severed family ties ;
written lying vows ; signed false oaths ; torn up
pitilessly tender appeals for redress, and tossed away
into the fire supplications blistered with tears; packed
cards and cogged dice ; or used pistol and sword as
calmly and dexterously as he now ranges his battalions
of gold pieces." The cogging of dice and the pack-
ing of cards are easily credible, but who can put faith
in the lying vows and stabbed hearts ? These, in-
deed, are the trappings of the crudest melodrama, and

190

THACKERAY

PA-

are out of place in a comedy of manners. It is not
surprising that the worthy J. J., himself a strayling
from a sentimental theatre, should believe in and
" shrink away from such lawless people," but their
introduction gives an air of unreality to Thackeray's
" naturalism," and suggests that the Pre-Raphaelite
view of life was as primitive as the inspiration of
their painting.

The truth is, that whenever Thackeray mounted
upon his predicatory hobby-horse (and this spirited
steed prances energetically through The Newcomes)^
he does not know how far it will carry him. He
apostrophises his readers ; he apostrophises his char-
acters ; he_ calls upon vague unseen powers to redress,
the balance. " Beati illi ! " he exclaims, when he re-
gards the tie of friendship which unites the Colonel
and his son. " Beati illi ! oh man of the world,
whose wearied eyes may glance over this page, may
those who come after you so regard you ! O gener-
ous boy, who read in it, may you have such a friend
to trust and cherish in youth, and in future days
fondly and proudly to remember ! " The wearied
man of the world is as purely fantastic as the gentle-
man of the stabbed hearts and false oaths, and it is
difficult to see why he is called in to wonder at a
simple situation. And the puzzle is all the greater,
because Thackeray was very quick to detect false
sentiment in others. The Washerwoman of Finch-
ley Common always moved his ridicule ; but he was
not above taking a leaf out of her book. " Let us
be thankful for our race," says he, when he remem-

THE NEWCOMES I9I

bers Thomas Newcome's earliest friend, " as we
think of the love that blesses some of us. Surely it
has something of heaven in it, and angels celestial
may rejoice in it, and admire it." Hovi^ever worthy
the sentiment may be, it is too obvious to need ex-
pression ; and, thus expressed, it seems to echo the
very tone and accent of the Washerwoman herself.

However, Thackeray was not eminent for his
philosophy, which was superficial, nor for his moral
reflections, which were commonplace ; and the chief
merit of The Newcomes^ as of Pendennis, lies in its
characterisation. A word first as to the conduct of
the story. His earliest critics admired, with justice,
the ease wherewith he " kept every member of the
crowd faithful to his own nature." A vast number
of actors play their part upon the stage of The New-
comes ; they grow from youth to middle life under the
eye of the reader, and they seldom, if ever, do vio-
lence to the law of their being. Moreover, the
novel, if it has neither plot nor hero, presents the
history of a whole family, and covers two genera-
tions. It is true that one lady dies, and is brought to
life again, but this is the sole outrage upon probability,
and none of the others ever goes back upon himself.
So, while Thackeray holds the threads tightly in his
own hands, he places them unravelled in the hands
of the reader. The exposition of the family and its
early history is a marvel of lucidity, which, though it
is packed with information, is never dull.

Yet, if the characters are consistent each with itself,
they are not always consistent with the general plan.

Ig2 THACKERAY

In other words, like the personages of Vanity Fair,
they are drawn in varying planes. The Colonel, for
instance, Charles Honeynian, and Fred Bayham are
overcharged to caricature, and are not designed on the
same scale as Ethel and Barnes Newcome, the best
examples of Thackeray's " naturalism." At the first
publication of the book. Colonel Newcome ' seems to
have won all the suffrages. His nobility of character
attached the soft-hearted at once. He was said to
exceed Don Quixote himself, upon whom he was
modelled, in humane dignity. His death affected the
public, like the death of Paul Dombey, with the sense
of personal loss. Opinion has now undergone a re-
action, and the majority is content to accept Thack-
eray's own opinion. " He is a dear old boy," he
wrote to Miss Proctor, " but confess you think him
something of a twaddler." That is precisely what he
is : he is a twaddler, who harmonises very ill with his
surroundings, even when all deductions are made for
his training and for the many years he has spent in
India.

At his first entry into the Cave of Harmony, he
makes it evident that his style and stature are not
those of the men who surround him. He is at once
too simple and too pompous to be naturalistic. " And
this is the abode of the Muses," says he, as he looks

1 Ingenuity has been busy in seeking the original of Colonel

kjNewcome. He is probably a composite portrait, which owes

"f '' something to Sir Richmond Shakespear, something to an old pen-

'' ''' sioner at the Charterhouse, whom Thackeray visited, but most of

,/if all to the author's stepfathar, Major Carmichael Smyth.

THE NEWCOMES I93

about him with an amiable pride. He thinks Hoskins
as good as Incledon. He invites Mr. Nadab, the lit-
tle Jew, for whom we may read Sloman, to dine with
him, and at every sentimental ditty " the tears trickle
down the honest warrior's cheek." But when Cap-
tain Costigan has finished the second verse of the
ribald song which he volunteers, the Colonel starts
up, seizes his stick, and roars out Silence ! " ferocious
as though he had been going to do battle with a
Pindaree." Tradition assures us that the song the
Captain sang was the famous " Sam Hall," ' and if it
were, it is difficult to understand why it was so stub-
born a rock of offence. But the Colonel's fighting
blood is up; he involves the whole company in Costi-
gan's degradation and dishonour; and, as the chron-
icler says, " that uplifted arm had somehow fallen on
the back of every man in the room." In this same
spirit of the antique world he deplores the society
into which he is thrown. His brothers' lack of cor-
diality is as unintelligible to him as Costigan's drunken
shame. He carries unselfishness to the point of in-
humanity ; his generosity, his kindliness, his folly are

1 The song which is said to have aroused the Colonel's wrath,
the notorious Sam Hall, though it is familiar by tradition, has not
yet got into print. The hero of the ditty was one Jack Hall, a
chimney-sweeper — his name was changed to Sam by a poet's
licence — who was hanged at Tyburn in 1707 for breaking the
dwelling-house of Captain Guyon. He was so famous a rascal in
his own day that he inspired an elegy and an epitaph, as well as
the song which still survives. The " pretty new Tune," called The
Chimney-Sweep, to which the song was sung, may be found in Tom
D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth {\-j 12).

194 THACKERAY

all too great for flesh and blood. Even the pathetic
scene, in which the Colonel says " Adsum," does not
move us as it should, because we have so little confi-
dence that the Colonel ever lived and breathed.
Thackeray has spared his readers nothing ; he has
deafened their ears with an appeal for pity. And
when the pity should be given, it is perforce with-
held ; for who can shed tears for the travesty of a
man ?

Charles Honeyman, too, is a frank caricature, and
though his hold upon life is not very secure, he is as
genial an impostor as fiction can present. On his
first appearance, with a begging letter, he strikes the
right note. Now, Charles has a style, which gives a
weight to his lightest word, a sense of importance to
his meanest action. Having ventured his all in the
acquisition of Lady Whittlesea's chapel, he addresses
the Colonel, upon whom he has drawn a bill. " Have
I genius ? " he asks in his best rhetorical manner.
" Am I blessed with gifts of eloquence to thrill and
soothe, to arouse the sluggish, to terrify the sinful, to
cheer and convince the timid, to lead the blind grop-
ing in darkness, and to trample the audacious sceptic
in the dust ? My own conscience, besides a hundred
testimonials from places of popular, most popular,
worship, from reverend prelates, from distinguished
clergy, tell me I have these gifts." So he cheerfully
listens to the voice, which urges Charles Honeyman
to go forth, and fight the good fight ; he as cheerfully
mulcts the Colonel of two hundred and fifty pounds.
But he is readily eloquent even upon the simplest

THE NEWCOMES Ig5

themes. In lofty terms he refers to the brothers
Newcome, " whom to name," says he, " is to desig-
nate two of the merchant princes of the wealthiest
city the world has ever known." "The fellow is
always in the pulpit," muttered Barnes Newcome
with perfect truth ; but the pulpit was his profession,
and he was not one to forego an advertisement.

He is, indeed, a very accomplished cleric ; he sings ;
he plays on the violoncello ; he has a thousand tales
and quips, wherewith he entertains the ladies who
worship at his shrine. His notions of luxury, per-
haps, better befit a French Abbe of the old school
than the incumbent of Lady Whittlesea's chapel.
But the labourer is worthy of his hire, and why should
not the impassioned orator live in comfortable ease,
and beguile his leisure with the perusal of impudent
French books, signed by the hands of Balzac, Dumas,
or Paul de Kock ? With such qualities, and such
ambitions, he is naturally a sensitive soul. In the
words of his friend F. B., Charles was " great in the
lachrymatory line " ; and it was said that " no man in
London understood the ring-business or the pocket-
handkerchief-business better, or smothered his emotion
more beautifully." But poor Charles was ill suited
to fight the harsh, unsympathetic world. He fell
upon evil days ; he mortgaged his chapel to one Jew,
himself to another; and Sherrick, the Hebrew, who
used the basement of the sacred edifice as a wine-
vault, might, as F. B. said, "turn Lady Whittlesea
into a synagogue, and heave the chief Rabbi into the
pulpit."

196 THACKERAY

Yet all was not lost. F. B. was still fertile in re-
source. He was taking tea with Mrs. Sherrick when
the great idea came to him. The singing boys had
all gone to the Cave of Harmony. Why should not
the ladies take their place, and sing Handel to the
strains of an organ ? It was a harmless dodge, as F.
B. said, but it drew immensely. Mrs. Sherrick and
her daughter adopted a nun-like costume, practised by
moonlight in the chapel, and " the thing took."
Charles Honeyman was himself again, and a few les-
sons from Husler, of the Haymarket, put a fine pol-
ish on his elocution. " His sermons are old," as F.
B. confessed, " but, so to speak, he has got them up
with new scenery, dresses, and effects ! " The flow-
ers came from Covent Garden. The Flemish-painted
window was picked up in Wardour Street; the new
hymn-books were large and gilt. In brief, all the
trappings were superb, and fashion set with a favour-
ing breeze towards Lady Whittlesea's chapel. Charles
himself, splendid in prosperity, affected a mediaeval
pose. An odour of mille-fleurs rustled by as he took
his place at the desk. His vestments were simpler
and more austere than heretofore ; the curl, upon
which he had lavished so much care, was gone from
his forehead. The performance succeeded marvel-
lously. Sherrick paced up and down the aisle, say-
ing, " Capital house, wasn't it ? " and Honeyman's
fortune was remade.

Honeyman is one very good example of Thack-
eray's caricature. Mr. Frederick Bayham is another,
extravagant as the accomplished, aristocratic Stiggins.

THE NEWCOMES I97

Now F. B. also has a style, more robust and flam-
boyant than his friend's. F. B. is built upon a large
scale. He weighs fourteen stone, and his boots,
" known by the name of the Prussian general who
came up to help the other christener of boots at
Waterloo," his trousers, his dressing-gown, ragged
and flowing, even his voice, are all large. He speaks
in the grandiloquent manner which befits the man of
letters. " Salve, spes, fidei, lumen ecclesice^'' thus he
salutes his friend Honeyman ; and then tells him " by
cock and pye " that his wine is not worth a " bender"
a glass. He has an easy gift of imitation and of in-
solence. He gives an exhibition of his uncle the
bishop ; he reminds the Reverend Charles of the lies
which he told at school, and he desires to inform
Colonel Newcome that he is " an orphan himself, in
needy circumstances, and he heartily wishes he would
adopt him." Meanwhile he is delighted to dine with
the Colonel, and to declare his " deliberate opinion
that F. B. has got into a good thing."

But F. B., too, " descended from the ancient kings
that long the Tuscan sceptre swayed," has his mo-
ments of didacticism. It is not a panegyric of debt that
he sings, like Panurge, but a threnody. He addresses
a solemn warning to Clive, telling him that he dodges
down a street to avoid a boot-shop, or that his colos-
sal frame trembles if a sudden hand is put upon his
shoulder. And all this he does in a style which gives
you the impression that he is drawn from life, and then
exaggerated beyond the measure of reality. He is
eminent in whatever company he finds himself,

igS THACKERAY

whether it be at the Cave of Harmony or in Park
Lane. When The Pall Mall Gazette offers him an
opening for his talents, he turns his hand to anything
with a joyous facility. Art, the drama, theology, are
the same to him. But his masterpiece, no doubt, is
" Pulpit Pencillings," which, signed Laud Latimer,
give a tone of rare respectability to the paper. "You
wouldn't suppose, now, my young Clive," says he,
" that the same hand which pens the Art criticisms,
occasionally when his Highness Pendennis is lazy,
takes a minor theatre, or turns the sportive epigram,
or the ephemeral paragraph, should adopt a grave
theme on a Sunday, and chronicle the Sermons of
British Divines ? " But thus it is that he assisted in
the rehabilitation of the Rev. Charles Honeyman, and
even that enterprise did not exhaust his versatility.
When the Bundelcund Banking Company was at the
height of its prosperity, F. Bayham betook himself to
the city. Here, as elsewhere, he cut a splendid fig-
ure. He moved among " managers and city nobs " ;
he ate " kibobs with nabobs." He took the rooms
which were once graced by the Rev. Charles; his
costume was at once more cleanly and yet more
variegated than before. No longer dependent upon
the pittance which he drew from The Pall Mall
Gazette, he assumed what he deemed his proper
station in life, and even contemplated marriage
and a settlement. But into whatever situation he was
cast, F. B. filled it in all senses with ease and humour,
and he remains one of the masterpieces in Thackeray's
gallery of portraits.

THE NEWCOMES 1 99

But excellent as these two are, — Honeyman and
F. B., — they are not triumphs of "naturalism," and
Tf we are on the lookout for that quality, we must
seek it in Ethel Newcome and her brother. Now,
Ethel is not a flood of tears, a mere bundle of sensi-
bilities ; she is a real woman, and assuredly Thackeray
drew few characters which surpass her in verisimili-
tude and individuality. At her first entrance upon the
scene, child though she is, she is already determined
and herself. " Alone, farouche, and intractable," — •
it is in these terms that she is described, — and " alone,
farouche, and intractable " she remains to the end.
The prejudices of her family affect her so little that
she is ready to defend the Colonel and his son. " You
are always sneering about our uncle, and saying un-
kind things about Clive," she darts out at Barnes, and
her courage equals the generosity of her thought. She
is represented as gravely proud, yet kindly withal,
" quick to detect affectation or insincerity, impatient
of dulness and pomposity," and these qualities, added
to a gift of sarcasm, and a love of truth, which flashes
from her grey eyes, render her unpopular with both
men and women.

But Thackeray is not content with enumerating
her qualities : he makes her speak and act always in
accord with them. In her many encounters with her
brother and Lady Kew she is quietly victorious :
conscious of the schemes which are laid for her mar-
riage, she frustrates them with a natural bravery, and
an honest simplicity, which are admirably depicted.
" We are sold," she says ; " we are as much sold as

200 THACKERAY

Turkish women ; " yet Kew might have held her to
the bargain had he not fallen below her lofty stand-
ard. When Lady Kew insults her, " Keep your bad
names," says she, " for my Aunt Julia; she is sick
and weak, and can't defend herself" She resolves
to accept neither abuse from the old lady nor lectures
from Kew. At Baden she defies every one of them —
Kew, his mother, and the Duchesse d'lvry. She
keeps the famous ball alive almost by herself. She
dances with Count Punter, with Captain Blackball,
with any one that comes along, and in answer to re-
monstrance asks, " Was she to be so proud as not to
know Lord Kew's friends ? "

It is not surprising, therefore, that she should de-
spise the humble obedience of Lady Clara. " The
sight of the patient timid little thing chafed Ethel,
who was always more haughty and flighty and bold
when in Clara's presence than at any other time."
But, despite the intrigue which goes on about her,
she is resolute to direct her own life. She refuses
the honest Kew, who " takes his share of the pain as
a boy at school takes his flogging, stoutly and in si-
lence," and she refuses him from a scruple, which,
though honourable enough, she might have waived.
In her treatment of Lord Farintosh, her other lover,
she behaves with a pride and dignity which the poor
Marquis cannot understand ; and the whole scene is
written with more than common skill. In brief,
though Thackeray too often held a loose hand upon
his plot, though he not seldom permitted his person-
ages to act and speak as they listed, he treated Ethel

THE NEWCOMES 201

Newcome with consistent sympathy and care. He
had nnade up his mind about her before he began, and
he never forgot the admirable qualities which distin-
guish his heroine. He has sketched her appearance
with a precision which is rare in his works. She is
tall, he tells us, " a severe Diana"; her hair and
eyebrows are jet black, and in her black hair is "• a
gentle ripple,'' as when a fresh breeze blows over a
melon hudor " y her eyes are grey ; her mouth rather
large ; " her teeth as regular and bright as Lady
Kew's own." It is by these signs that we may rec-
ognise her, and if her features are familiar to our
sight, her heart and character are yet more clearly
revealed to our understanding ; she has no kinship
with the Lauras and Helens, whose tears have washed
the truth from so many of Thackeray's pages ; she is
a real woman, faithfully drawn, and the reader cannot
but regret that in the end she is mated with so indis-
tinct and irresolute a young man as Clive.

Barnes, her brother, is made of other metal ; yet
he also rings true to himself and to his author's pur-
pose. Nothing can surpass the placid self-assurance
wherewith this " fair-haired young gentleman, languid
and pale, and arrayed in the very height of fashion,"
receives the Colonel. " Very happy to see you, I'm
sure," said the young man. "You find London very
much changed since you were here ? Very good time
to come — the very full of the season." He is so
pleased with himself and his career that he patronises
not merely his uncle but Sir Thomas de Boots and
the other fogeys that he meets at his club. He is

202 THACKERAY

abashed at nothing — not even when he has to confess
that he has never heard of Don fixate. And why,
indeed, should he have heard of Don Quixote ? The
one end and aim of his life is to make money. For
this he would even sacrifice his own pleasures, and
after all what are pleasures to a man who worships
wealth and respectability with a constant heart ? If
he speaks of business, he instantly drops his languor
and affectation, and becomes simple, selfish, and alert.
In a moment he is as " keen as the oldest curmud-
geon ; a lad with scarce a beard to his chin, he would
pursue his bond as rigidly as Shylock." The Colonel
loathes his worldliness even more bitterly than his in-
solence. " If he is like this at twenty, what will he
be like at fifty ? " groans the old soldier.

Above all, the young man is determined never to
compromise himself in the eyes of his fellows. He
" never missed going to church or dressing for din-
ner. He never kept a tradesman waiting for his
money." For the same reason he never drank too
much, and always showed up at his office spick and
span. Of course he is a cheat and a coward, to
whom honour is of far less importance than the law.
He takes charge of letters, and keeps them back.
When the famous paper is found in Orme's History^
which should benefit Clive, Barnes stoutly refuses to
make restitution. But though he is resolute enough
in holding on to his money-bags, at the mere sugges-
tion of a quarrel, this " Fenchurch Street fire-eater "
takes alarm. When Clive, having thrown a glass of
wine in Barnes' face overnight, visits him in the

THE NEWCOMES 2O3

morning with an apology, he receives him with a
nonchalant civility, as though nothing had happened.
" You are come to breakfast, I hope," says he, and
swears that he has forgotten the row and the broken
glass. When he should have resented the appear-
ance of Jack Belsize at Baden, he trembles at the
very mention of his name, and shifts his hand un-
easily to a pistol at a moving shadow. But it is to
the Colonel and Clive that he most conspicuously
shows the white feather. He refuses to fight the
Colonel on account of their relationship, and assumes
a noble rage at the enforced discretion. But when
Clive takes up his father's quarrel, he turns tail and
flees in an agony of terror. It is old Sir Thomas de
Boots who best sums the matter up. " Yesterday,"
says he to Barnes, " you talked as if you would bite
the Colonel's head off, and to-day, when his son
offers you every accommodation, by dash, sir, you're
afraid to meet him. It's my belief you had better
send for a policeman. A 22 is your man. Sir Barnes
Newcome." On the other hand, Thackeray, having
for the moment deserted caricature for naturalism,
does not make Barnes all bad. He endows him
with easy manners, a bitter satirical tongue, and a
gift of waltzing. He even admits that while he is
not handsome there is "something in his face odd-
looking and distinguished." He makes him a pres-
ent of beautiful feet and hands. In brief, as Thack-
eray explains, Barnes has an air. He has an air
when at the Newcome Athenasum he shows that the
true office of the bard is to appeal to the affections ;

204 THACKERAY

that " to decorate the homely threshold, to wreathe
flowers round the domestic hearth, is the delightful
duty of the Christian singer." And it is only in
moments of stress, as when Belsize drags him from
his saddle, that his air evaporates. But Thackeray had
the tact never to make him inhuman, and he is from
first to last a piece of genuine and faithful portraiture.
Of the other characters some are good, some bad,
yet Thackeray moves them all on and off the stage
with an adroitness which the reader cannot but ad-
mire. Clive himself is a florid young man, for whom
it is diiBcult to entertain much sympathy. A livelier
Pendennis, he is generous, and gay, and noble-hearted,
and all that. " His laughter," we are told, " cheered
one like wine " ; but his very virtues render him
incredible, and he leaves pretty much the same im-
pression upon us as a barber's block. Moreover, he is
a painter, and painters in fiction are always dull, with
their chatter of Raphael and Michael Angelo, and the
sketches which they dash off at a stroke. As for
Rosey, she is but the shadow of a shade, which disap-
pears as silently as it comes. Her mother, on the
other hand, the famous campaigner, is made of sterner
stuff, both humanly and artistically. She is drawn
with so firm a hand, her intrigues and her avarice are
so vividly depicted, that she seems to have passed out
of literature into experience, and to be recognisable
wherever we have the misfortune to meet her. And
old Lady Kew, who uses her poor daughter Julia as a
pincushion, and who is, it must be confessed, a trifle
melodramatic, takes her place in the same corner of

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the gallery as Miss Crawley and the Baroness Bern-
stein.

Most of the rest we are content to forget. J. J.
and Miss Cann, for instance, are so highly character-
istic of their own age that they are wholly uninter-
esting to ours. But there is one scene in the drama,
laid at Baden, which not merely introduces a set of
Parisians, rare in English fiction, but which is com-
posed in such a vein of comedy as Thackeray seldom
struck. The trappings are as gay as the drama : the
tables, the avenues, the music of Baden are indicated
with a light hand. The ball, whereat the fates of
many are decided, is as good as a scene from an old
comedy. Above all, the French men and women, who
intrigue and gamble in the little capital of the Ger-
man state, are essentially French. They are en-
livened, it is true, with more than a touch of carica-
ture ; but for all that they think and act as befits their
nationality, and they could not under any circum-
stances be mistaken for the compatriots of The
Newcomes. The English novelist who would depict
a Frenchman is so often content to sketch a Briton,
change his clothes and break his English, that Thack-
eray's performance is the more remarkable. Indeed
we know not where to match his Floracs and his
Ivrys, unless it be in the Renee of Beauchamp' s Career,
who, however, is a greater achievement, since she is
natural as a flower, and owes nothing to the brilliant
colours of caricature.

But if to be prophetic is to be true, then Thack-
eray deserves the highest praise. His Madame d'lvry,

206 THACKERAY

Royalist, Philippist, Catholic, Huguenot, the exponent
of all the fads and every fantasy, the haggard siren,
who believes herself the image of Mary Queen of
Scots, has been reincarnated a dozen times since
Thackeray. She died in Paris a brief five years ago,
and in Paris, w^e make no doubt, she is living again
to-day. And ce petit Cabasse, the student of lavs?,
whose lyrics — " les Rales d'un Asphyxie " — have not
passed unnoticed, whose family has been at feud with
I'Angleterre since the days of the Prince Noir — was
he not born again a " deliquescent " some fifteen
years since ? Did he not frequent the cenacles of the
Latin Quarter, and print his verses in the journals of
the decadence ? True, these types are eternal ; but
Thackeray, despite his English blood, understood them
perfectly, and drew them with an astonishing accuracy.
But by far the most engaging of them all is M. de
Florae, who plays an entertaining and distinguished
part in the comedy of Baden. Under all circum-
stances he proves himself a gentleman and a man of
honour. Thackeray wrote few better pages than
those which describe Clive's meeting with him at
Baden. Fortune has been unkind to M. de Florae ;
she has emptied his purse, his portmanteaus, his
jewel-box, his linen-closet. " This campaign has
been my Moscow, mon cher" he tells Clive. " I am
conquered by Benazet ; I have lost in almost every
combat. . . . Sometimes I have a mind to go
home; my mother, who is an angel of forgiveness,
would receive her prodigal, and kill the fatted veal for
me. But what will you ? He annoys me — the do-

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mestic veal." So they dine at Duluc's,and are waited
upon by Frederic, who plays Balderstone to Florae's
Ravenswood. " Yes ; I am Edgar," exclaims the
nobleman, who, even after Moscow, is still gay, pol-
ished, and good-tempered. And, then, acknowledg-
ing that the passions tear him, that play is fatal, but
not so fatal as women, he proposes to be Clive's
Mentor. " I saw you roder round the green tables,"
says he with a fine fancy, " and marked your eyes as
they glistened over the heaps of gold, and looked at
some of our beauties of Baden." But, though he
suffer defeat, he is still master of his destiny. Per-
turbed neither by wealth nor by poverty, he is equal
to every encounter. Being a Catholic, he does not
feel a complete sympathy with his wife, nee Higg, of
Manchesterre, in the comte of Lancastre ; being a
gentleman, he treats her with a touching deference.
When his cousin dies, and he becomes a prince, he is
as modest (and as arrogant) as ever. He delights in
penny cigars, and when Barnes offers him a seat in his
brougham, " Bah ! " he says, " I prefer the p'eniboat.'^
With perfect discretion he suppresses his princely
title ; with perfect philosophy he justifies the sup-
pression. " Moncontour cannot dine better than
Florae," says he. " Florae has two louis in his
pocket, and Moncontour exactly forty francs."
When he grows rich he is still the same Paul de
Florae, " sober and dignified " ; but in all circum-
stances he is charming, and Thackeray was in his
gayest mood when he invented M. le Prince de Mon-
contour.

208 THACKERAY

In conclusion. The Nevucomes is a formless book
with brilliant passages, and it bears in every chapter
the traces of Thackeray's haphazard method. The
story was " revealed " to him, he says, at Berne in
Switzerland, where he had strayed into a little wood,
and both characters and plot grew under his hand as
they listed. It was written at odd times and in odd
places, and when it was finished, Thackeray con-
templated it, as he contemplated all his books, with a
curious aloofness. He hardly knew whether the peo-
ple of his drama " are not true ; whether they do not
live near us somewhere." Such was his attitude to-
wards his creations. He thought them alive; he
heard their voices ; he was touched by their grief;
but he was never really master of them ; and the
result is that half The Newcomes is irrelevant.

In 1857 Thackeray permitted himself a holiday
from literature, and stood for Parliament. His views
were Radical, and the seat which he chose to contest
was Oxford. Nor was it unexpected, this incursiorr
into politics, for politics had attracted him ever since,
at the age of twenty, he had aided Charles Buller at
Liskeard. In The Constitutional, as we have seen, he
had " supported consistently, though feebly, the great
cause of Radicalism," and he had expressed his sym-
pathy with Richard Cobden by contributing a drawing
or two to The Anti-Corn-Law Circular. But though
his interest in the affairs of the country was constant,
he cannot be called a violent partisan, and it would
puzzle the most ingenious reader to formulate his
political creed. The author of The Book of Snobs

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was obviously a staunch democrat, who loved the
people for its own sake, and who devoutly believed in
the natural wickedness of monarchs. "I would like
to see all men equal," he wrote in 1840, "and this
bloated aristocracy blasted to the wings of all the
winds." When Punch gave him his chance, he de-
scended from the general to the particular, and at-
tacked the Prince Consort, his hat, his Chancellor-
ship, and all that was his with a ceaseless violence.^
The Bal Boudre, which the queen gave in 1845,
aroused his bitterest scorn, and inspired him to a piece
of satire that was neither pointed nor in good taste.^

But for all his detestation of kings, for all his love
of the free and enlightened democracy, he had no
sympathy with the people when it attempted to cap-
ture its " rights " by force. He found its " views
about equalising property " mere robbery, and he
" thanked God that they had not a man of courage at
their head who might set the kingdom in a blaze."

1 In Mr. Spielmann's Hitherto Unidentified Contributions of W.
M. Thackeray to ' Punch ' the curious will find ample material for
forming a judgment on Thackeray's political opinions.

5 It has been said by more than one of his champions that
Thackeray had a profound admiration for the Queen and Prince
Albert. If this were so, he showed it in the oddest fashion, and
Shirley Brooks's well-known lines, quoted by Mr. Spielmann, ex-
pressed the general indignation : —

" We'll clear thy brain. Look westerly. See where yon Palace stands ;
Stains of the mud flung there by thee are on thy dirty hands."

But Shirley Brooks wrongly attributed the offence to Douglas
Jerrold, with whose disloyalty he contrasted

" The truthful, social sketch, drawn with Titmarshian skill
With colour bright as Dickens's, and pencil keener still."

2IO THACKERAY

In Other words, his love of the people was platonic,
and was more than counterbalanced by his hatred of
physical force. So, too, in his treatment of Ireland,
he never showed a bigoted admiration of one party or
the other. He judged even the great O'Connell on
his merits, and while to-day he pronounced him " the
greatest man in the Empire," and eloquently com-
pared him to Washington, to-morrow he is a buffoon,
who, when " the Want of a Nation stares him in the
face, replies with a grin and a gibe," an old sharper,
who takes his compatriots' money, and " scorns even
to hide the jugglery by which he robs them." His
views upon Young Ireland were equally inconsistent.
In 1843 he contributed an effusion — " Daddy, I'm
Hungry " — to The Nation • yet two years later he
had never heard of Davis, whom he attacks with be-
coming energy. And through it all he was constant
only to one thing — Home Rule — which he supported
at first for the sake of Ireland, and secondly that
Great Britain might be well rid of a disloyal and
avaricious partner.

Such was Thackeray's political record, when in
1857 ^^ opposed Mr. Cardwell at Oxford. The cir-
cumstances of the election were peculiar : the sitting
member, Mr. Neate, had been unseated for "two-
pennyworth of bribery which he never committed,"
and Thackeray frankly declared that " he would not
have stood against Cardwell, had he known he was
coming down." But having stood, he fought the
election with all his energy. The foremost plank in
his platform was the question of reform, which he

THE NEWCOMES 211

had strenuously supported ever since his appearance
at Liskeard in 1832; and he not only pronounced
himself in favour of the ballot, but declared that it
was his ambition to amend the suffrage " in nature,
as well as in numbers." In accord with the princi-
ples which he had always professed, he believed that
the State would be benefited " by the skill and talents
of persons less aristocratic " than those who were
then administering it, nor did he spare the electors the
familiar commonplaces about " hard-working, honest,
rough-handed men." At the same time he loyally
promised to " advance the social happiness, the
knowledge, and the power of the people," and he
lost many votes by advocating the opening of muse-
ums on Sunday. But throughout the election he
showed himself a man of the world rather than a
serious politician. He owned that he " could not
speak very well, but," said he, " I shall learn," and
he plainly recognised that talking was not the chief
business of the House of Commons. That he was
not returned was not surprising, least of all to him-
self, and at the declaration of the poll he made his
happiest speech, told the story of Gregson and Gully,
how the victorious prize-fighter was the first to shake
the hand of the vanquished, and declared that he
would retire, to "take my place with my pen and ink
at my desk, and leave to Mr. Card well a business
which I am sure he understands better than I do."
Thus ended Thackeray's one political interlude,
which in his own phrase was " very good fun," and
the failure of which none regretted less than himself.

CHAPTER VIII

THE VIRGINIANS THE EDITORSHIP OF THE

CORNHILL

So he returned to take his place with his pen and
ink at his desk, and four months after his defeat at
Oxford there appeared the first number of a new
novel — The Virginians^ a Tale of the Last Century.
As Esmond was the natural result of the lectures on
The Humourists, so The Virginians came in due
sequence after the lectures upon The Four Georges,
and Thackeray's two journeys to America. But no
books could diiFer more widely in treatment than
Esmond and The Virginians. Esmond is a deliberate
work of art, composed with a definite purpose, and in
a definite style. It is the worst fault of The Virgin-
ians that it is without form or shape. It is less a
novel than a series of essays interspersed with anec-
dotes, and with experiments in the art of literary imi-
tation. It professes by a permissible fiction to be
written by a descendant of the Warrington family.
But Thackeray too often forgets this fact, and lets the
story write itself in the language of the eighteenth
century. The consequence is that the two styles
constantly overlap. The story is now a modern

' The Virginians was published in twenty-four monthly parts,
from November, 1857, to October, 1859.
212

THE VIRGINIANS 213

retrospect, now an antique experience, and the author
is as uncertain of his style as he is mutable in his
point of view. Again and again he will interrupt a
narrative which belongs to the eighteenth century
with references to Carlyle, or to Mr. Disraeli's House
of Commons. One thing only is unchanging, — the
moral reflection, which is always of the nineteenth
century, whether it be expressed by the author or by
one of the actors in his drama. The result is a
jumble of interests, a confusion of tongues.

To say that the book is at its best when Thackeray
most resolutely suppresses himself is superfluous, and
the sudden intrusion of modern ideas may generally
be taken as a sign of the author's boredom with his
own characters. Yet, even where he adheres most
closely to his period, he shows in The Virginians signs
of haste and lassitude. The real personages whom
he introduces are too near to history to be part of fic-
tion. Tunbridge Wells in his eyes is a sort of
Madame Tussaud's, in which all the celebrities of the
time are collected, clothed and coloured precisely as
you would expect them, and obviously wax. No
doubt March and Selwyn, Johnson and Richardson,
James Wolfe and the Countess of Yarmouth, were
alive at the same time ; no doubt, also, an author who
includes them all in one chapter kills many birds with
a single stone. But he does it at too high a cost.
He sacrifices probability beyond all hope, and where
he should present the portrait of a man he suggests
the research of a popular text-book. And while he
destroys the verisimilitude of his characters by their

214 THACKERAY

mere proximity one to another, he spoils each of
them by making him, as it were, a sublimation of the
truth. He treats them as he treated Steele and Addi-
son in Esmond: he never permits them to utter a
word that is unexpected. They must be true, every
one of them, to popular biography ; and yet we be-
lieve that even Lord March and Jack Morris some-
times opened their mouths without making a bet.

The Virginians, then, is a thing of patches, not an
organic whole, and though some of the chapters thus
loosely knit together are humorous or picturesque, it
is impossible to sustain one's interest in a bookso
various as this in style, character, and intention. But
it would not have been written by Thackeray if it
had not contained some half-dozen scenes of vivid
drama, and more than one admirably drawn portrait.
The purpose of the book, to which, by the way, the
author did not long adhere, is made clear in the open-
ing sentence. " On the library wall of one of the
most famous writers of America," says Thackeray,
" there hang two crossed swords, which his relatives
wore in the great War of Independence. The one
sword was gallantly drawn in the service of the king,
the other was the weapon of a brave and honoured
republican soldier." The two swords might have
suggested an interesting study of opposing loyalties
and severing patriotisms. But Thackeray forgot his
swords long before he came to the end of his novel;
and the fact that the two Warringtons took different
sides in the American Rebellion is either irrelevant or
obscured.

THE VIRGINIANS 215

What remains is a story of life as it was lived in
the eighteenth century, with America for a shadowy
background, and with a far-off echo of Braddock's
campaign. The best scene is the first of all, in which
is described Harry Warrington's visit to the home of
his ancestors. Seldom has the sentiment of the re-
turned traveller been better rendered, and this traveller
returns to a home which he knew only by tradition
and report. Yet, though he looked upon the scene
for the first time, it was perfectly familiar to his eye.
He easily pictured the knights and huntsmen of a by-
gone age crossing the ford, to draw the sword per-
chance in the service of their king, or to hunt their
quarry with hawk and hound. Meantime "the clink-
ing of the blacksmith's forge, the noises of the even-
ing, the talk of the rooks, and the calling of the
birds," stirred in his mind the recollection of a past
he had never seen, and yet knew more intimately than
that which happened a year ago in Virginia. If only
Thackeray had kept the whole book in this same key
he would have written a masterpiece fit to rank with
Esmond^ but unhappily he soon let the necessity of
writing so much a-month conquer him, and the book
made itself the vehicle of the social prejudices and
historical sympathies of its author. Even though the
scene be laid at the Wells or the playhouse, the reader
cannot but think of Pendennis or Clive Newcome.
Harry Warrington is but these blameless youths in
another dress. Though he gambles with a braver
recklessness than the young Pendennis, he is, like
that hero, merely " wild," not " wicked " ; and yet.

2l6 THACKERAY

despite the author's protestations, despite Harry's
virtuous attachment to the aged Maria, despite even
the priggish reprimands of James Wolfe, and the
sound advice of the amiable Lambert, the friend of
March and Selwyn must, one is sure, have been
wicked as well as wild. The Fortunate Youth, in-
deed, is not more easily convincing than Thackeray's
other heroes ; and while we are content to trace in the
features of General Lambert, the kind, scholarly old
soldier, who loved Rabelais, and sought his classical
quotations in Burton's Anatomy^ a resemblance to the
author of his being, it is, as usual, in the rogues, not
in the virtuous citizens, that Thackeray is at his best.
If Will Castlewood be exaggerated, Sampson, the
roystering parson, who loves wine better than his
prayers, and gambling better than either, is by no
means ill-drawn. Still better is my Lord of Castle-
wood, who, though he is a sharper and a coward,
preserves the outward seeming of a gentleman. He
is a fine specimen of the correct rogue : he is the
Barnes Newcome of his century, but better bred and
better mannered. The young Virginians are rightly
pleased to be in his company. Nothing can disturb
his invariable attitude of politeness, and his dissipated
pomposity is only skin-deep. He deplores to Harry
Warrington the love of play which has made him
the poorest peer in England ; and though his reputa-
tion is so bad that few care to play with him, he
regretfully spares the Mohock, as he called Harry, so
long as he is under his roof. At the same time,
he frankly recognised that he was a fool " to fatten

THE VIRGINIANS

217

a goose for other people to feed off." In brief, " he
was aTar abler man than many who succeeded in
life. He had a good name, and somehow only
stained it ; a considerable wit, and nobody trusted it ;
and a very shrewd experience and knowledge of man-
kind, which made him distrust them, and himself
most of all, and which was perhaps the bar to his
own advancement." But such as he was, Thackeray
drew him with evident understanding ; and the best
of him is that, though he shows the white feather,
and cheats at the cards, he never loses the outward
restraint and decorum of a gentleman.

A far greater figure is the Baroness de Bernstein,
who not only confers distinction upon The Virginians,
but is one of the very best portraits in Thackeray's
gallery. Now Thackeray had a very keen eye for a
worldly old woman ; he understood, as few have
understood, both the comedy and the bitterness of her
existence. But never did he surpass the Baroness de
Bernstein, who is superior to Miss Crawley in force,
to Lady Kew in geniality, to both in humour.
Though she is but Beatrix Esmond grown up, she is
as far beyond that dashing young lady in tempera-
ment as in years ; though she be harsh and imperious
if she be not obeyed, she cherishes a warm affection
for those who bow the knee and live up to her stand-
ard of conduct. But the shallow artifices which the
Castlewood family adopted to gain her favour did not
deceive her for a moment, and, " being a woman of
great humour, she played upon the dispositions of the
various members of this family, amused herself with

2l8 THACKERAY

their greedinesses, their humiliations, their artless
respect for her money-box, and clinging attachment
to her purse." But it was with a very different eye
that she looked upon the strayling from Virginia,
whose exclusion from Castlewood aroused her fury.
An incivility put upon him excited her ire at the very
outset. Perhaps it was the memory of the boy's
grandfather that angered her against the meanness of
the Castlewoods ; but this restless and resolute
woman instantly took Harry Warrington under her
charge, and, callous-hearted though she were, she
stoutly protected him against his cousins. The first
meeting between the old lady and the Virginian is
in Thackeray's best manner. When Harry first
entered the garden of Castlewood, the baroness was

already pacing the green terraces which sparkled
with the sweet morning dew, which lay twinkling,
also, on a flowery wilderness of trim parterres, and
on the crisp walls of the dark box hedges, under
which marble fauns and dryads were cooling them-
selves, whilst a thousand birds sang, the fountains
plashed and glittered in the rosy morning sunshine,
and the rooks cawed from the great wood."

Admirable as is the setting, the dialogue is worthy
of it. Nor was the baroness disappointed in the
young Mohock : she talked of none but him, she
praised his courage and address, until his cousins were
weary of his name ; and, with a rare confidence, she
told him the story of the house, and showed him the
room where his grandfather used to sleep, and the
secret cupboard where Mr. Holt, the Jesuit, con-

C(

THE VIRGINIANS 219

cealed his papers. But sentiment was not natural to
her, and she very soon put it aside. With the
greatest cunning she held up the absurd Maria to
ridicule before the enamoured Virginian. "She takes
liberties with herself," said the old lady, drinking
from a great glass of negus. " She never had a good
constitution. She is forty-one years old. All her
upper teeth are false, and she can't eat with them."
What words could have been more cleverly devised
than these to kill the passion of love in a boy's
heart ? But the baroness did more ; she did not
scruple to steal the compromising letter which bound
Harry to his Maria, and she only failed to separate
the two because she did not rightly measure the
depth of the boy's loyalty.

Above all, she wished that Harry should not grow
up a milksop. She fondly believed that her nephew
was leading not merely a merry life, but a wicked
one, and had she known the truth she would have
been bitterly disappointed. Even when the scape-
grace was arrested she was still disposed to help him,
provided he was not too deeply committed, for avarice
quarrelled in her heart with affection, and in the old
lady's eyes her own advantage still came first. Yet
when Harry rejected her terms she was sincerely
proud of him ; she was delighted at the contempt
with which he treated her lawyer ; indeed she liked
nothing better than to see a man insolent in adversity.
And when her nephew was overwhelmed with ruin
she gave him the soundest advice. '"Fiddle-de-dee,
sir ! ' said she. ' Everybody has to put up with imper-

220 THACKERAY

tinences ; and if you get a box on the ear, now you
are poor and cast down, you must say nothing about
it ; bear it with a smile, and, if you can, revenge it
ten years later. JHoi qui vous park, sir ! — do you
suppose I have had no humble-pie to eat ? All of us
in our turn are called upon to swallow it ; and now
you are no longer the Fortunate Youth, be the Clever
Youth, and win back the place you have lost by ill-
luck.' "

Dr. Tusher's widow no doubt had been given
plenty of humble-pie, but she was endowed with a
temperament which nothing could dismay, and at
every point she was her nephew's superior. Yet
keenly as she was interested in men and women, she
found a still keener enjoyment in gambling, and she
was never so happy as at the green table. " The
cards," said she, in a passage of admirable philosophy,
" don't cheat. A bad hand tells you the truth to
your face ; and there is nothing so flattering in the
world as a good suite of trumps." So the baroness is
drawn cynical and imperious, and from beginning to
end she is consistent and alive. For once Thackeray
was determined to depict a character without pointing
a moral or embellishing a sentiment, and though we
may regret the somewhat tedious surroundings in
which Madame de Bernstein finds herself, we would
not change a single touch in her admirable portrait.

Before the last number of The Virginians was pub-
lished, Thackeray had undertaken the editorship of
The Cornhill, an enterprise which brought wealth and
fame to all concerned with it. The hour was pro-

THE VIRGINIANS 221

pitious, and the man was found. The magazines of
1859 were, with few exceptions, of a grave and sober
suit. The Quarterly and The Edinburgh had not yet
lost their autocracy ; they still dictated what the world
should think upon all matters of politics and litera-
ture. Blackwood' s alone succeeded in combining in-
struction with amusement, and its example was clearly
worth following. Nor could a better figurehead be
found for the ship which George Smith was about to
launch than the author of The Virginians. Thack-
eray's name was familiar to the whole English-speak-
ing world, and while the slightest essay which he
wrote himself was sure of attention, he was distin-
guished enough to enrol under his banner the greatest
of the land. Moreover, the public taste was not yet
debauched by " popular " literature, and it is not won-
derful that the liberal energy of George Smith was
instantly rewarded.

But the founder of The Cornhill did not make his
happy choice without hesitation. His first intention
was to rely upon Thackeray for a long story, and to
intrust the editorship to another hand. But when
Tom Hughes declined his aid, on the ground that he
was pledged to another house, the publisher invited
Thackeray to take the editor's chair, and it was under
Thackeray's auspices that the first number of The
Cornhill appeared. First of all a title was necessary,
and it was Thackeray who hit upon the obvious yet
distinguished name by which the magazine has been
known for nearly half a century. In September, 1859,
he wrote to George Smith from Coire, in Switzerland,

222 THACKERAY

telling him that St. Lucius, the founder of St. Peter's
Church, Cornhill, was buried there. " Help us, good
St. Lucius ! " he exclaimed, and St. Lucius in return
gave him the happy inspiration. Six days later the
title was found : " The only name I can think of as
yet is ' The Cornhill Magazine.' It has a sound of
jollity and abundance about it." The proprietor wel-
comed the suggestion, and on January i, i860, the
first number appeared. Its success was instant and
overwhelming.^ " It was the literary event of the
year," said its proud founder ; " along Cornhill noth-
ing was to be seen but people carrying bundles of the
orange-coloured magazine." Of the first number
120,000 copies were sold, and while the commercial
triumph was never doubtful, the magazine won the
esteem of all the best judges. Monckton Milnes
thought it " almost too good both for the public it
was written for and for the money it had to earn."
Even FitzGerald, rarely roused to enthusiasm, pro-
nounced the first number " famous," though his eagle-
eye saw " the cockney let in " at the second number.
The success was well deserved and not surprising.
Not only did Thackeray attract the wisest contrib-
utors, but George Smith was " lavish to recklessness," ^

' See Mrs. Richmond Ritchie's " First Number of The Cornhill"
in The Cornhill oi ]\i\y , 1896, and Mr. G. M. Smith's " Our Birth
and Parentage" in The Cornhill of ]a.nu3.xy, 1901.

^ Mr. Smith's figures are more eloquent than pages of comment.
The largest sum he paid for a novel was £'j,ooo, which was ex-
changed for Romola. The highest rate at which short articles
were rewarded was £i2, 12s. a page, which Thackeray received
for The Roundabout Papers, and the most ever spent upon a single

THE VIRGINIANS 223

and the first number could hardly be surpassed in in-
terest and variety. Mr. Anthony Trollope opened
with the first chapters of Framley Parsonage^ Thack-
eray himself began Lovel the Widower^ and men so
distinguished as Sir John Bowring and Sir John Bur-
goyne were content to suppress their names and give
their knowledge. In brief, there was enough in the
new magazine to attract all readers ; the generous
founder was justified of his liberality ; and Thackeray
took a frank delight in his victory. No sooner was
the first number published than with a boyish enthu-
siasm, characteristic of him, he went ofi^ to Paris for
a holiday. During these happy days he could not
sleep, so he said, " for counting up his subscribers."
He told Mr. James T. Fields, who found him in the
Rue de la Paix half delirious with joy, that " London
was not big enough to contain him, and he was
obliged to add Paris to his residence." He was eager
to buy pocketfuls of diamonds, that he might spend
something at least of his princely income ; and if he
saw half-a-dozen Parisians chatting together, he was
sure that news of The Cornhill had reached France,
and that the circulation was still going up. But not
only did he feel a private joy in his success ; he blew
the trumpet of The Cornhill with a public and a signal
flourish. In a paper, entitled On some Late Great
Victories^ he celebrates his own and his proprietor's
triumph. He fancies the Imperator standing on the
steps of the temple on the Mons Frumentarius, and

number was ;^i,i83, 3s. 8d. These figures might well turn the
magazine-writer of to-day green with envy.

224 THACKERAY

addressing the citizens. " Quirites," says he, " in
our campaign of six months we have been engaged
six times, and in each action have taken near upon a
hundred thousand prisoners. Go to ! What are other
magazines compared to our magazine ? "

But in the cup of victory there was already a bitter
drop ; there were already thorns in the cushion which
covered the throne of editorial state. Thackeray, in
fact, soon found the chair, in which at the outset he
took so just a pride, anything but comfortable. He
had neither the sense of business which distinguishes
the perfect editor, nor the hard heart which makes it
easy to reject a proffered contribution. He was in-
different to the stings of adverse criticism. The
shillelahs of all Donnybrook hurtled round his im-
pavid head. But he could not bear to refuse the idle
poetry or the foolish prose of those who thought their
happiness depended upon his acceptance of their
wares. " Before I was an editor," he wrote, " I did
not like the postman much ; but now ! " It was in
vain that he urged his correspondents to address their
letters to the office of the magazine. He was pur-
sued by complaints and entreaties even to his own
door. Wherever he sat down, there was the thorn
awaiting him, and he knew no remedy but to get rid
of the editorial cushion forever. In May, 1862,
then, he resigned. " I had rather have a quiet life
than gold-lace and epaulettes," he said, in a character-
istic letter of farewell, " and deeper than ever did
plummet sound, I fling my speaking-trumpet." But
though he resigned his editorship, he did not cease to

THE VIRGINIANS 225

contribute. " Let my successor command The Corn-
hill" wrote he, " giving me always a passage on
board ; and if the printer's boy rings at my door of
an early morning, with a message that there are three
pages wanting or four too much, I will send out my
benediction to that printer's boy, and take t'other
half-hour's doze."

However, Thackeray's success is indisputable. The
Cornhill in his hands was not a mere rag-bag of odds
and ends ; it was a genuine magazine of literature,
and the readers and writers of this age may look upon
it with an envious regret. The vast interest which it
excited, the vast circulation which it achieved, would
be impossible to-day ; nor can we contemplate the
change which has come over the public taste with
equanimity. The best books are for the few now, as
always ; but magazines make a direct appeal to the
people, and survive only by the people's favour.
Forty years ago Tennyson and Swinburne, Locker
and Matthew Arnold, Lytton and Sir John Herschel,
Sir James Stephen and Washington Irving, could
ensure a generous publisher a hundred thousand sub-
scribers. To-day they would be powerless to attract.
They were not " bright " ; they were not " chatty " ;
they were poets and men of letters giving their best
and winning their proper reward. Contrast Thack-
eray's Cornhill with the printed stuff that is read to
shreds in every 'bus and railroad of the kingdom,
and you may measure the disastrous change which has
come over the public taste. Can anything be more
ignoble than the incoherent, useless information, the

226 THACKERAY

ruthless uncovering of privacy, which are the distin-
guishing marks of our popular magazines ? And
against this irrelevant gossip the best wits of the age
would fight in vain ; yet pestered though Thackeray
was by thorns in his cushion, he was still an editor
who might treat his contributors with generosity and
his subscribers with respect.

Of Thackeray's own contributions to The Cornhill
there is little to say. Lovel the Widower is the trans-
lation into another medium of a little play — A Sheep
in Wolf's Clothing — which Thackeray composed for
his friends. It contains the same reminiscences, the
same reflections, which illumine Thackeray's larger
works. Mr. Batchelor, like the author of his being,
purchases a paper which brings him more experience
than profit, and assumes the role^ generally enacted
by Pendennis, of special providence to all the charac-
ters of the story. But it is neither fresh nor spark-
ling, and little else need be said of it than that it made
its first appearance in the first number of The Cornhill
side by side with Framley Parsonage^ and that doubt-
less it satisfied a public loyally determined to admire
all that came from Thackeray's pen. Nor was
Philip a more genuine success. Though it was built
upon an ampler scale, and expressed a higher ambi-
tion, it is formless and void. It bears upon its pages
all the signs of fatigue. Neither the action nor the
characters progress at more than a foot's pace ; the
same situation recurs with a wearisome iteration ; the
hero is always poor and always quarrelling with his
bread and butter ; and when the split panel of a car-

THE VIRGINIANS 22/

riage — surely a clumsy artifice — reveals old Ring-
wood's will, the reader can but be delighted that never
again will Philip take counsel with Pendennis, the
Cynic, and his too amiable Laura.

At the same time, Philip disarms criticism. No
one was more honestly conscious of its defects than
Thackeray himself. He knew that it was a mere
echo from the past, and he spoke of it in the tone of
tired depreciation. " Oh, it's weary work," he wrote
to Mr. George Smith. " I don't know whether you
or I should be most pitied." When Elwin, the truest
of his friends, praised it, Thackeray did not hesitate
to expose its weakness. " I have told my tale in the
novel department," said he. " I can repeat old things
in a pleasant way, but I have nothing fresh to say. I
get sick of my task when I am ill, and think. Good
heavens ! what is all this stuff about ? " There is a
deep pathos in Thackeray's disgust at his own work.
Yet the disgust and the pathos were perfectly sincere.
To rewrite the early chapters of his autobiography, to
tell the thrice-told tale of a young journalist's fight
with poverty, was a hopeless task, and one which he
probably would not have undertaken, had not ill-
health hampered his imagination.

But when he said that he had " told his tale in the
novel department," he was unduly depreciative. In
Denis Duval., unhappily left a fragment at his death,
he recovered his old mastery, he displayed his old
style. Better than this, he suppressed himself more
rigidly than he had ever done, save in Barry Lyndon
and Esmond. He aimed with perfect deliberation at

228 THACKERAY

the reproduction of a certain period in which there
was no scope for " snarling cynical remarks " nor
trite moralities. In other words, he made a return to
history, always his favourite pursuit, and he studied
his characters and their environment with a rare dili-
gence. Moreover, as though to compensate for the
broken narrative, Thackeray left behind a set of notes
which reveal to us the birth and progress of the story.
For once, at any rate, the novelist was master of his
material ; for once he refused to follow whither his
puppets led him. The germ of his plot may be found
in The Annual Register of 1782, where the true history
is told of M. de la Motte and the traitor Liitterloh.
But how liberally has the author's imagination trans-
lated fact into fiction ! With how deft a hand has he
dressed the dry bones of truth in the trappings of
romance ! And while the notes upon Denis Duval,
afterwards published by Mr. Greenwood, are a lucid
commentary upon so much of the story as we possess,
they prove with how fine a spirit the unwritten chap-
ters might have been informed. We should have had
an account of Pearson's splendid battle with Paul
Jones, the Pirate ; we should have been told how
Denis Duval, chained in the hold of a Dutch East
Indiaman, was rescued by the captain of a Kingston
privateer; nor would this have been the last of
Denis's adventures, for he was destined to rise by
hard work and hard service, to see fighting in France
and Spain and America, to witness the execution of
Major Andre, and to prove himself in all latitudes a
proper hero of romance. Then he was to encounter

THE VIRGINIANS 229

horse-thieves and smugglers ; he was to take part in
the Deal riots, and to oppose the great Mackerel party,
of which his grandfather, the old perruquier, was an
eminent member.

Indeed, the unwritten chapters of the book would
have been salt with the sea-spray and red with the
blood of fighting men. Above all, as if to show up
his own familiar practice, in Denis Duval Thackeray
had left nothing to chance. He had studied the
topography and government of Winchelsea, the scene
of his story, with the utmost care. He had noted its
three gates, its mayor and twelve jurats, its privilege
of " sending canopy-bearers to a coronation " ; he had
made researches into the French Reformed Church,
whose members had a settlement at Rye — in brief, he
had overlooked nothing which might throw light upon
his period and his personages. Yet he subordinated
the truth to a romantic effect with so delicate a tact
that there is never a suspicion of pedantry in the
book. In other words, he is not the slave of facts,
and to compare his note-book with the unfinished
fragment is an excellent lesson in the art of fiction.
Admirable as are the characters who play their parts
in the drama, it is the harmoniously consistent atmos-
phere of the story which wins our highest respect,
and intensifies the regret that so fine a work was
cruelly interrupted. Nor did its quality lack appre-
ciation. " In respect of earnest feeling," said Charles
Dickens, " far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and
a certain loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I
believe Denis Duval to be much the best of his

230 THACKERAY

works" ; to which high tribute, generously paid by a
great craftsman to his colleague, there is no word to
add.

But besides his novels, Thackeray contributed to
The Cornhill a set of essays called The Roundabout
Papers^ which contain much of his best writing.
Mellower in judgment, maturer in temper, than his
earlier essays, they are enlivened by a serious gaiety,
an amiable reflection which their author rarely
equalled. Their excellence is not suprising, because
to write essays was at once the talent and the bane of
Thackeray. He held opinions upon all subjects, and
he liked to express them — a liking which discursively
interrupted the progress of his stories. But in The
Roundabout Papers he was preaching about himself,
and the world, not about the puppets of his own cre-
ation, and he could be as desultory as he chose, with-
out defeating his own purpose. FitzGerald declared
that as he read them, he heard Thackeray " talking
to him," and though " conversation " is not in gen-
eral the test of a good book, the essayist may easily
be forgiven if he talks to his readers. Thackeray,
moreover, was checked by the necessities of the
magazine to a concision that you do not often find in
his works, and this simple restraint gave a fine meas-
ure and rhythm to his prose. Egoism is, as it should
be, the essence of the papers. Thackeray discourses
of his youth, his travels, and his method of writing,
with the regretful geniality of an oldster looking back
upon the past. With an affectation of garrulity, he
records his pleasant reminiscences. Now, he pictures

THE VIRGINIANS 23 1

himself as a " lazy, idle boy," living in fancy with
Dumas' musketeers, or returning home from school
hungry and with an empty pocket. Now, he recalls
the golden days of youth, " when the stage was cov-
ered with angels, who sang, acted, and danced,"
when Duvernay and Sontag shone star-like in the
theatre. " Ah, Ronzi de Begnis, thou lovely one ! "
he exclaims ; " Ah, Caradori, thou smiling angel !
Ah, Malibran ! " Thus he praises the tempus actum^
like the old fogey he liked to think himself; thus he
deplores the deterioration of women, and the lament-
able taste of the young fellows, who still found beauty
in the actresses of a degenerate age.

Then he strikes a sterner note, and in a panegyric
of JVIacaulay and Washington Irving, sings the praises
of his own craft. " We may not win the baton or
the epaulettes," said he, "but God give us strength
to guard the honour of the flag." Or he rises to a
just indignation against the policy of America. Or
he eloquently advocates, in an essay On' Ribbom^'-'-zn
order of Britannia " for the unnamed heroes of the
merchant service. But throughout these last essays
his sympathies are wider and deeper than you expect
in this castigator of human folly. Tom Sayers' vic-
tory over Heenan awoke his enthusiasm. " If I
were absolute king," says he, " I would send Tom
Sayers to the mill for a month, and make him Sir
Thomas on coming out of Clerkenwell." He is
happy, as usual, in remembering France, and the
thought of Desseins' hostelry evokes a sympathetic
memory not only of his own youth, but of Sterne,

232 THACKERAY

Brummel, and other birds of passage, who in days of
yore sojourned at Calais. The Roundabout Papers,
in brief, show the best side of Thackeray, and sug-
gest, that though Thackeray could not refrain from
essay-writing even in his novels, how brilliant an es-
sayist was lost in the author of Vanity Fair.

Edward FitzGerald noted as a characteristic of
these last papers a quick sensitiveness to adverse crit-
icism — a nervous resentment against the misunder-
standing of foolish persons. It is not only that
Thackeray administers — in an essay On Screens in
Dining-Rooms — a well-deserved castigation to Ed-
mund Yates, whom he invites to " put up your note-
book ; walk out of the hall ; and leave gentlemen
alone who would be private, and wish you no
harm " ; he displays an inclination to take offence,
which was alien to his nature. This FitzGerald at-
tributed to ill-health ; and it is true that his friends
had observed a recurring fatigue. Yet again and
again he rallied, and for a while anxiety was dis-
pelled. The respite was not for long ; his work was
done; towards the end of the year 1863 he was
gravely ill ; and on the morning of Christmas Eve he
died without pain or warning. Of death he had no
fear ; in Mrs. Ritchie's words, " he was not sorry to
go." He had faced the end before with an easy
mind and a confident trust. " Those we love can
but walk down to the pier with us " — he had written
some years before to Mrs. Proctor — " the voyage we
must make alone. Except for the young or very
happy, I cannot say I'm sorry for any one who dies."

THE VIRGINIANS 233

Not only did he look upon death with composure ;
he could contemplate with satisfaction twenty years
of unremitting toil, and reflect that he had built his
own monument. Death, then, had less regret for its
victim than for his friends. He was mourned by
thousands, who knew him only by his works, as well
as by those whom intimacy permitted to understand
their loss. FitzGerald (the oldest, most faithful of
his friends, yet one of how many !) sat moping
about him in his " suburb orange," and reading his
books, and thinking he would " hear his step up the
stairs to this Lodging as in old Charlotte Street thirty
years ago." And without doubt or question we may
echo FitzGerald's informal epitaph : "a great Figure
has sunk under Earth."

CHAPTER IX

Thackeray possessed in a greater measure than any
other English writer the style coulant, which Baudelaire
ascribed in dispraise to George Sand. His words flow
like snow-water upon the mountainside. He could
no more restrain the current of his prose than a gentle
slope could turn a rivulet back upon its course. His
sentences dash one over the other in an often aimless
succession, as though impelled by a force independent
of their author. The style, as employed by Thackeray,
has its obvious qualities and defects. It is so easy
that it may be followed by the idlest reader, who
willingly applies to literature the test of conversation.
The thread of argument or of character is so loosely
held that it need not elude a half-awakened attention.
On the other hand, the style must needs be at
times inaccurate and undistinguished. The solecisms
of which he is guilty, and they are not few, may
readily be forgiven. It is more difficult to pardon the
frequent lack of distinction, especially as in Esmond

' In this last chapter I propose to regather the threads, to resume
as briefly as may be the traits, which marlt Thackeray off from his
fellows both as a writer and as a man. Much has been said in the
preceding chapters on those subjects, and I may perhaps be for-
given if, for the sake of completeness, I am now and again guilty of
repetition.
234

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 235

Thackeray proved that he could write, if he would,
with perfect artistry. But the method of his more
familiar books seems the result less of artifice than of
temperament. He seldom gives you the impression
that he has studied to produce a certain effect. An
effect is there, of course, facile and various, but
beyond his management. He is so little conscious
of his craft, that he rarely arrives at the right phrase,
thus presenting an obvious contrast to Disraeli, who,
often careless in composition, yet sowed his pages with
pearls of speech which time cannot dim. But how
little do we take away from the most of Thackeray
beyond a general impression of gentlemanly ease !

From this it follows that he possessed no economy
of speech. He never used one word, if a page and a
half could adequately express the meaning, and at all
save his high moments you miss a controlling hand, a
settled purpose. Nor is this remarkable, when you
recall the shifts and starts in which he did his work.
He was of those who write better anywhere than in
their own house. He would carry his unfinished
manuscript to Greenwich with him, and write a chapter
after dinner, or he would go off to Paris, and compose
as he went. " I should never be at home," he told
Elwin, " if I could help it. ... I write less at
home than anywhere. I did not write ten pages of
The Nevjcomes in that house at Brompton.
This " — meaning a hotel — " is the best place to
work in."

While Thackeray left the words to look after them-
selves, he confesses himself the humble slave of his

236 THACKERAY

own characters. "Once created," said he, "they
lead me, and I follow where they direct." He de-
vised his actors as by instinct, and without realising
the full meaning of the drama in which they played
their part. " I have no idea where it all comes from,"
he told EI win. "I have never seen the people I
describe, nor heard the conversations I put down.
I am often astonished myself to read it when I have
got it on paper." It is not strange, therefore, that he
regarded the personages in his own dramas as quite
Outside himself. " I have been surprised," says he, " at
the observations made by some of my characters. It
seems as if an occult power was moving the pen."
And it was precisely this externality which linked
Thackeray and his characters in the bonds of acquaint-
ance. Had they been the deliberate and conscious
creations of his brain, they would have been at once
more and less familiar to him. He would have re-
membered precisely where the strings lay which pulled
the figures ; but he could not have said, " I know the
people utterly — I know the sound of their voices."
He would not have seen Philip Firmin in a chance
visitor ; he would not have recognised the drunken
swagger of Captain Costigan, when he met him, years
after his creation, in a tavern. We may be quite sure
that he never encountered Sir Francis or Beatrix Es-
mond, for these he made himself; but the majority of
his characters grew without his knowledge, and even
against his will. " That turning back to the old
pages," he murmurs in a passage of genuine lament,
" produces anything but elation of mind. Would you

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 237

not pay a pretty fine to be able to cancel some of
them ? Ah, the sad old pages, the dull old pages ! "

It was this fatality, this frank obedience to his own
puppets and his own pen, which explains the frequent
formlessness of Thackeray's work. But though he
permitted most of his books to write themselves, it
must not be thought that his style was uniformly
hazardous. Despite its occasional inaccuracy, de-
spite its loose texture, it has many shining qualities.
It is graphic, various, and at times eloquent. It is
easy to recall a hundred passages which would entitle
Thackeray to a high place among the writers of Eng-
lish. The Waterloo chapters of Vanity Fair, much of
Esmond^ Harry Warrington's first visit to England,
Denis Duval's journey to London, — these, to name
but a few, are touched by the hand of a master,
who need fear comparison with none. Even where
Thackeray's prose is least under control, it inspires
no more than his own regret that he did not write
" a completely good book." For it is always the
prose of a man of letters.

Now, in Thackeray's time scholarship was not
fashionable. Neither Dickens nor Bulwer (save in
his last novels) give you a sense of literary allusion.
But Thackeray, in his most careless mood, suggests
the classics or hints at the eighteenth century. As he
wrote rather as an essayist than as a novelist, as his
style was a sincere, untrammelled expression of his
mind, he reveals his literary preferences by a thousand
light touches. His reading, if not wide, was deep.
He was perfectly familiar with both the Augustan

238 THACKERAY

ages. Horace he knew best of all, and quoted most
constantly. Nothing pleases him better than to allude
in a phrase to his favourite poet. " Nuper — in former
days — I too have militated," thus he writes in The
Roundabout Papers, " the years slip away fugacius ; "
and again, " to-morrow the diffugient snows will give
place to Spring." Above all, he loved the Augustan
doctrine of an easy life. The contemner of Swift
naturally found Juvenal a " truculent brute," but he
felt a natural sympathy for the satirist of Venusia,
who timidly avoided unpleasant themes, and who, had
he lived in the nineteenth century, would have been
a man about town, and have haunted the very clubs
to which Thackeray himself belonged. And when he
chose to express himself in verse, he echoed with skill
and fidelity both the manner and the philosophy of
Horace.

To our own Augustan age his Lectures on the Hu-
mourists are an eloquent, if misleading, tribute. He
was, after them, the eloquent champion of simplicity.
That which he prized most highly in his own work
was the rigid exclusion of barbarous or fantastic
words, the stern avoidance of involved sentences.
And what he avoided himself, he sternly reprobated
in others. See how wittily, in his Essay on Thunder
and Small Beer, he exposes the turgid sentences of
The Times, with how hot an iron he brands the pom-
pous Latin of the critic. " That is proper economy,"
says he of the Thunderer's finest sentence, " as you
see a buck from Holywell Street put every pinchbeck
pin, ring, and chain which he possesses about his

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 239

shirt, hands, and waistcoat, and then go out and cut a
dash in the park, or swagger with his order to the
theatre." But Thackeray would have his ornaments
few and appropriate. Maybe the Augustan ideal,
simplex munditiis, impoverished his style ; maybe he
would have been the greater for a deeper conscious-
ness of himself and his appearance. And though he
loyally followed the simplifiers of our English tongue,
he knew and admired the better models. If we as-
sume, as we may, that General Lambert, of The Vir-
ginians, was his mouthpiece, he loved Rabelais and
Burton with a constant heart, though he did not admit
their influence. Lamb he canonised, and he could
quote to excellent purpose Richard Graves' Spiritual
Quixote, a piece of satire ill deserving the oblivion into
which it has fallen. Again, he tells us that Montaigne
and Howell's Letters were his " bedside books." " If
I wake at night," said he, " I have one or other of
them to prattle me to sleep again." But it was not
until he attained the serene egoism of The Roundabout
Papers that either of these writers directed his foot-
steps, and though they solaced his sleepless nights, by
temper and sympathy he remained a true Augustan.

In nothing did he show himself a man of letters
more clearly than in his versatility. He could bend
his mind to more than one kind of literature. For
him the English language was an instrument upon
which he could play many measures. In his hands it
was apt for satire or reflection, for fiction or criticism.
Though he was often careless of his own style, he had
a quick perception of style in others, as is proved by

240 THACKERAY

his imitations of the novelists, the very perfection of
criticism. It is doubtful whether Disraeli took much
pleasure in Codlingsby, which, nevertheless, touches off
the extravagances of his style with a wit which is still
modest, with a humour which will never lose its
sparkle. Then, again, he was a great hand at a con-
troversy, as many a mangled opponent found to his
cost. And he could turn easily from a full-length
novel to the exquisite fooling of a tale written for
children. His Christmas Books, though written in con-
formity with a prevailing custom, are by no means the
worst of his works, and he seldom surpassed the ami-
able drollery and good humour which keep The Rose
and the Ring ever fresh.

Once upon a time he aspired to be a painter ; he
had worked in a Parisian studio ; and it is therefore
the more remarkable that he is seldom deliberately
" picturesque." He does not, like the novelists of our
own day, ladle his local colour out from a full bucket.
He may weary the reader with tedious sermons ; he
never tries his patience with purple passages of irrel-
evant description. Indeed, he so sternly suppresses
the external world that when you recall his novels,
you have but a faint impression of the scene on which
the drama is played. The few landscapes which he
sketches produce, from their very rarity, an astonish-
ing effect. There is, for instance, a picture of Baden
by night in The Newcomes, which presents the whole
scene without the waste of a word : " The lights
twinkle in the booths under the pretty lime avenues,"
thus the passage runs. " The hum of distant voices

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 24 1

is heard ; the gambling palace is all in a blaze ; it is an
assembly night; and from the doors of the Conversa-
tion Rooms, as they open and close, escape gusts of
harmony. Behind on the little hill the darkling woods
lie calm, the edges of the fir-trees cut sharp against
the sky, which is clear with a crescent moon." Again
there is a keen sense of the open air in the passage
which describes Esmond's departure from Newgate,
and Temple Garden looking " like the garden of
Eden," and " the busy shining scene of the Thames
swarming with boats and barges " ; and best of all
there is the picture of Clavering, drawn with careful
discrimination, and the artist's eye on the object. For
the rest, Thackeray is more deeply interested in his
characters than in their environment ; and though his
reticence is vastly preferable to the ill-considered
picturesqueness, nowadays so popular, we would gladly
have exchanged a hundred of his sermons for one deft
sketch of an English countryside or foreign watering-
place.

It has been said more than once that Thackeray
was impervious to the influences of his time. He
never had the literary measles ; he never submitted to
the dictation of coteries. He did not find himself by
the sedulous imitation of others. What he was at the
beginning he was at the end, — a man of letters, to
whom time and experience gave not a new style, but
merely a better control of his material. He lived
through the Romantic movement unscathed, and he
borrowed not much else from Balzac than a trick of
keeping the characters he had once created for an-

242 THACKERAY

Other occasion. But he was more intent to preserve
their names than their personalities, and got little else
from the French literature, which he knew well, than
a few superfluous Gallicisms. Of his own fancy he
had not a high opinion. " One of Dickens' immense
superiorities over me," said he, " is the great fecundity
of his imagination. Perhaps Bulwer is better than
both of us in this quality ; his last book written at fifty
is fresher than anything he has ever done." This
statement hardly does justice to Thackeray's talent.
It is true that in such works as Philip he merely re-
peated himself; but the repetition was the result of
fatigue; and if imagination be anything better than the
invention of odd types and strange embroilments,
Thackeray had his share of it. To put a plain man
upon his legs is (maybe) a more difficult feat of fancy
than to depict a brigand, and Thackeray's triumph
was won in the field of realism. Not that he prac-
tised the method as it has been understood since his
day, or that he cared for the arid accumulation of
superfluous facts. On the contrary, he could neither
suppress himself nor forget the familiar tricks of the
fairy story. But he aspired always to be a painter of
manners, an historian of his own time, and this
creditable aspiration gave an air of reality to* his
novels.

His contemporaries believed that he was something
more than a novelist. In the simple, trusting view
of Charlotte Bronte, for instance, he shone as a
social regenerator, and he himself resolutely hoped to
better mankind. He complained that Byron never

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 243

wrote from his heart, and he forgot that the head, not
the heart, is the safer place wherefrom to write. So
he valued himself and was valued by others, not for
his admirable gifts of humorous portraiture, for his
careful dissection of human foibles, but for the idle
work of " social regeneration," which cannot live out
its own day, and for many tedious sermons. The
truth is, there were always two men in Thackeray,
the sentimental moralist, whose obvious "lessons"
were long since forgotten, and the keen-eyed ironist,
for whom life was an amusing game, whose rules
were independent of virtue, and in which the scoun-
drel was most often victorious. It is this twofold
character which explains why the most of Thack-
eray's work was marred by a kind of uncertainty, and
justifies Carlyle's admirable comment : " a beautiful vein
of genius lay struggling about in him." The genius
never overcame the struggle. When the ironist was
disposed to take a large view, the moralist interrupted
his vision, and the moralist was so tight bound to the
superstitions of his age, that he will probably never
appear as great as he did to some of his contempor-
aries.

And as the writer was perplexed by a twofold
character, so also was the man. It would be easily
possible, without suppressing or twisting a single fact,
to draw two distinct and opposing Thackerays. The
blackest portrait we have of him is Disraeli's St.
Barbe, which is painted in the darkest colours, and
without relief. Now St. Barbe, in Endymion's
phrase, is "the vainest, most envious, and the most

244 THACKERAY

amusing of men." He " snarls over the prosperity
of every one in this world except the snarler." He
is a misanthrope, " because he finds every one getting
on in life except himself." When Seymour Hicks
goes to a party, " that fellow gets about in a most
extraordinary manner," complains St. Barbe. "Is it
not disgusting ? . . . No lord ever asked me
to dinner. But the aristocracy of this country is
doomed." When, however, he dines at the Neucha-
tel's, he takes a frank delight in his host's magnifi-
cence, and only regrets that he did not know the
great man a year ago, when he might have dedicated
his novel to him. That is one portrait — of the mali-
cious, satirical dog, and it is superfluous to say that it
is overcharged. The other portrait, painted in lighter
colours, represents a man of infinite sensibility, eager
only to do good to his less fortunate neighbours, — a
cynic, whose cynicism is but a cloak for kindliness, a
modest gentleman, equally alive to his own defects
and to the merits of others. Of course neither
portrait is true, because both are inhuman, and the
truth will be found, as always, between the two.
But one thing is certain, if we may judge by the
memoirs of the time : Thackeray was not popular.
It was generally thought that this David, who had
slain many a titled Goliath, took a frank pleasure in
the society of the great. He was brusque in speech,
and quick in anger. He gave wanton offence to
strangers, who would not take the trouble to pierce
beneath the surface. When Anthony Trollope was
first presented to him, he murmured " How do ? "

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 245

and turned his back. Trollope, of course, effaced
the first impression, but at the time he was justly
angry, and declared to George Smith that had he not
" been in his house for the first time, he would have
walked out of it."

With Thackeray's dislike of his baser confreres it is
possible to sympathise. He loved his craft, but not
all his fellow-craftsmen. His vanity was too great to
bear the life of Grub Street. From long commerce
with those whom he properly deemed his inferiors he
was sensitively alive to his own superiority. Though
he loved equality as a doctrine, he would permit no
equality between himself and his colleagues. " There
is a modus in rebus" said he with perfect justice ;
" there are certain lines which must be drawn : and I
am only half pleased, for my part, when Bob Bow-
street, whose connection with letters is through Po-
liceman X and Y, and Tom Garbage, who is an
esteemed contributor to The Kennel Miscellany^ pro-
pose to join fellowship as brother literary men, slap
me on the back, and call me old boy, or by my
Christian name." One can easily imagine how he
winced under the infliction of Tom Garbage, but
Tom Garbage and his kind are apt to take their re-
venge, and Thackeray never cared to conciliate them.
He knew perfectly well that he was not a favourite.
" All people do not like me as you do," he wrote to
Elwin. " I sometimes think I am deservedly un-
popular, and in some cases I rather like it. Why
should I want to be liked by Jack and Tom ? . . .
I know the Thackeray that those fellows have im-

246 THACKERAY

agined to themselves — a very selfish, heartless, artful,
morose, and designing man." '

Indeed, it was in these colours that Thackeray too
often presented himself to the world. He appeared
morose, and even insolent, to many who had but a
superficial acquaintance with him. He was a big
man — he stood six feet two — who sometimes behaved
like a big boy. For him the world was still Grey
Friars, with himself head of the sixth form, and he
did not scruple to bully the youngsters. It is not
strange, therefore, that he was disliked. Even Lord
Houghton admits an " inequality and occasional per-
versity in his conduct," which, however, he attributes
to illness. On the other hand, he was naturally a
man of quick feeling and deep affection. But as
irony and morals conflicted in his novels, so superi-
ority and amiability fought in his character. He
would, and he could, have been at peace with man-
kind. " Love," he said, " is a higher intellectual
exercise than hatred." When, in 1849, Lady Bless-
ington's treasures were sold by auction, the valet
wrote to his mistress in these terms : " M. Thackeray
est venu aussi, et avait les larmes aux yeux en partant.

' It is unnecessary to discuss the dispute between Thackeray and
Edmund Yates further than to say that in this public encounter
with Grub Street Thackeray seems to have been in tlie right. It
is true that Thackeray himself had not scrupled to hold up certain
of his contemporaries to ridicule. But fiction and the newspaper
should be tried by different standards. Moreover, five-and-forty
years ago personal journalism was not yet omnipotent, and Thack-
eray had no resource but to protest against what he believed a
breach of private confidence.

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 247

C'est, peut-etre, la seule personne que j'ai vu reelle-
ment affectee a votre depart." There is an unso-
licited testimonial, the significance of which cannot
be overlooked. Moreover, Thackeray was often
generous both in deed and thought. His many acts
of charity he was stern to conceal, but he did not hide
his appreciation of those whom the people called his
rivals.

How, then, shall we harmonise the conflicting
opinions ? John Blackwood, who knew and loved
him well, declared that he was a mixture of " bitter-
ness and warm feeling," which seems no more than
the truth. To this one he showed his bitterness, to
that his warm feeling, and each went off with his own
story. Nor is Mrs. Ritchie's explanation incompati-
ble. " He was a diffident man," she says, " sensitive
and easily wounded, especially by any one for whom
he had a regard," and every one knows how easily
diffidence may be mistaken for pride, sensitiveness for
ill-temper. Thackeray, moreover, had fits of arro-
gance, which may well have astounded the Philistine,
and nothing more clearly illustrates his twofold char-
acter than an episode to be found in Lord Tennyson's
Life. Thackeray and Tennyson had dined together
— it was in 1846 — and Thackeray, full of confidence
in his own powers, had said of Catullus : " I do not
rate him highly. I could do better myself." The
morrow brought a more modest reflection. " My dear
Alfred," he wrote the next day, " I woke at two
o'clock " — it was the other Thackeray who woke —
"and in a sort of terror at a certain speech I had

248 THACKERAY

made about Catullus. When I have dined, some-
times I believe myself to be equal to the greatest
painters and poets. That delusion goes off, and then
I know what a small fiddle mine is, and what small
tunes I play upon \t. It was very generous of you to
give me an opportunity of recalling a silly speech ;
but at the time I thought I was making a perfectly
simple and satisfactory observation. Thus far I must
unbosom myself: though why should I be uneasy at
having made a conceited speech ? It is conceited not
to wish to seem conceited." It is a pleasant story,
which illustrates both sides of Thackeray's tempera-
ment, and helps us to resolve the riddle of his char-
acter.

His contemporaries, then, were compelled to judge
him with half the facts before them, and it is the
greater pity because many admirable qualities miti-
gated the stern view taken by his enemies. He was
liberally endowed with the rare and simple virtues.
He did not always take himself and his art too
seriously. " As for posterity," he once said, " be sure
that it will have its own authors to read, and I know
one who has very little anxiety about its verdict."
And though a belief in immortality was no compen-
sation to him, he faced the adversity of his early years
with conspicuous courage, content to do his day's
work, and win its reward, a reward which would seem
paltry in these days of avarice. He never stooped to
win an advantage by vain advertisement, nor to
achieve success by any means derogatory to his high
calling. But when prosperity came he delighted in it

THE WRITER AND THE MAN 249

with the candour of a big boy who had won a prize ;
and nothing could exceed the pleasure which he
showed in his house at Kensington, or in the imme-
diate triumph of The Cornhill. Early and late he
liked to pose as a man of the world, and that he was
a haunter of clubs is essential both to his life and
work. Indeed, it was this fact, coupled with an in-
verted snobbishness, that exposed him to the charge
of cynicism. Yet of the two men, the cynic and the
sentimentalist, who made up Thackeray, one would
have thought that the sentimentalist most often pre-
dominated. And let it be remembered, that if he
turned the cold shoulder to the passing stranger, the
best of his contemporaries — Alfred Tennyson and
Edward Fitzgerald — knew him and loved him well.
" A big mass of a soul, but not strong in proportion "
— such was Carlyle's verdict, which we may accept
in sympathy and understanding.

Index

America, Thackeray's visit to,

170 et seq.
Annual Register ^ The, 228.
Anti- Corn- Law Circular ^ Tke^

208.

Black Kitchen, the, 20 et seq.^

143-
Beauchanip^s Career, 205.
Becher, Anne, mother of W. M.

Thackeray, 1.
BlackwooiT s Magazine, 25, 221.
Book of Snobs, The, 76, 78, 79,

81, 83, 89, 116, 128.
Boswell, Croker's, 25.

Capers and Anchovies, 34 n.

Carmichael-Smyth, Major,
Thackeray's stepfather, 3, 15,
192 n.

Catherine, 31 and n., 32, 56, 58.

Catherine Hayes, 33 et seq.,
34 n.

Caution to Travellers, A, 42 n.

Cave of Harmony, The, 20 et
seq., 192, 196.

Charterhouse School, Thack-
eray at, 3 et seq.

Chimcera, The, 9.

Chronicle, The, I20, 148, 149.

Codlingsby, 240.

Comic Tales and Sketches, 36 n.

Confessions of the Countess of
Strathmore, The, 70 and n.

Coningsby, 102, 105, no, 114,

Constitutional, The, 15, 16, 208.
Contrast, The, 23.

Conversations with Lord Byron^

145 n-
Cornhill, The, 220, 221, 222 and

n., 223, 225, 226, 230, 249.
Cupid and Psyche 36.

Dandies, The, 19, 23.
De Finibus, 137.
De Juventute, 5.
Denis Duval, 227-229.
Devil's Wager, The, 14.
Diary of C. Jeames de la

Pluche, 36 and n.
Directions to Servants, 35.

East, Thackeray's Travels in

the, 54 et seq.
Edinburgh Review, The, 25,

26, 87, 221.
Elizabeth Brownrigge : a Tale,

29.
English Humourists of the

Eighteenth Century, The,

157-170, 173, 212, 238.
Esmond, 173-186, 212, 214,

215, 227, 234, 237.
Essay on Thunder and Small

Beer, 238.
Ethel Churchill, 23, 26.
Examiner, The, 119, 148.

Fancy, The, 96 n.

FitzGerald, Edward, references

to, 7, 9, 12, 52, 222, 230, 232,

233, 249 — Letters of, 17, 28

n., 41.
Four Georges, The, 168, 172,

212.

251

252

INDEX

Framley Parsonage, 223, 226.

Fraser's Magazine, 10, 12, 13,
15. 23. 25 and II., 27, 31, 35,
36 11., 39 n., 40 n., 42 n., 59,
142, 147.

GalignanVs Messenger, 17.

Germany, Thackeray's visit to,
10 et seq,

Gilbert Gurney, 146.

Gownsman, The, 8 and n.

Gronow's Reviiniscences, 109 n.

Grub Street, Thackeray's pic-
ture of, in Pendennis, 140 et
seq. — his dislike of, 245, 246 n.

History of Jonathan Wild the
Great, 32, 56, 58, 69.

History of Punch, 86 n.

History of Samuel Titmarsh and
the Great Hoggarty Diamond,
The, 39 and n., 40, 41.

Hitherto Unidentified Contribu-
tions of W. M. Thackeray to
" Punch," 209 n.

Hoggarty Diamond, The, 119.

Incognito, The, or Sins and
Peccadillos, 22.

India, Thackeray's early im-
pressions of, 2 et seq.

Ireland Sixty Years Since, 71 n.

Irish Sketch Book, The, 52, 54.

La Quinzaine Angloise d Paris,
oil V Art de s^y ruiner en peu
de terns, 43 n.

Legend of Jawbrahim Herau-
dee, The, 76.

L^ Empire, ou dix ans sous Na-
pol'eon, 63 n.

Letters, Montaigne and How-
ell's, 239.

Letters of W. M. Thackeray,
The, 156 n.

Letters to the Literati, 35.

Little Poinsinet, 43 n.

Lovel the Widower, 223, 226.

Luck of Barry Lyndon, The,
33. 53. 54. 56-73. «Si. 227-

Matilda, 23.

Melmoth the Wanderer, 11.

Memoir of Laman Blanchard,

150.
Memoires of Casanova, The, 64,

71-
Mes Larmes, I2i, 135.
Miscellaneous, 38 n.
Mississippi Bubble, A, 171.
Miss Shum^s Husband, 36.
Miss Tickletoby^s Lectures upon

English History, 76.
Modest Proposal, The, 164.
Monthly Mirror, The, \A,(i.
Morning Chronicle, The, 34 n.
Morning Post, The, 35, 76.
Mr. Brown's Letters to his

Nephew, 85.
Mr. Deuceace's Amours, 36.
Mrs. Perkins's Ball, 87, 138.
Museum, The, 15.

Nation, The, 210.

National Standard, The, 12-15,
40, 42 n.

Newcomes, The, 187-208, 235,
240.

Newgate Calendar, The, 33.

New Monthly, The, 31.

New York Evening Post, The,
156 n.

Notes of a Journey from Corn-
hill to Cairo, 54, 55.

Novels by Eminent Hands, The,
84.

On Half a Loaf, 172.

On Ribbons, 231.

On Screens in Dining-Rooms,

232.
On Some Late Great Victories,

223.
Oxford and Cambridge MagO'

zine. The, 187.

INDEX

253

Pall Mall Gazette, The, 141,

142, 144, 146, 198.
Paris Sketch Book, The, 14, 42

and n., 49, 52, 54.
Paris, Thackeray's residence in,

44 et seq.
Pelham, 133.
Pendennis, 4, 9, 34 n., 117, 120-

148, 153, 154. 188.
Philip, 31, 38, 226, 242.
Pickwick, 22.
Pictorial Times, The, 102.
Plurality of Worlds, The, 7.
Punch, 37 n., 54, 74-76, 84-86,

209.

Quarterly Review, The, 25, 86,
1 12 and n., 114, 187,221.

Recollections of Germany, 10.
Red Herrings, The, 19, 107.
Regina, 27, 151.
Revolt of Islam, The, 9.
Rose and the Ring, The, 240.
Roundabout Papers, The, 49,
222 n., 230, 232, 238, 239.

" Sam Hall," 193 and n.
Second Funeral of Napoleon,

The, 47 and n.
Shabby Genteel Story, A, 31,38

and n., 39.
Sharp, John W., 21 and n.
Sheep in Wolf's Clothing, A,

226.

Sketches by Boz, 22, 44.

Snob, origin of the word, 8 11.,

76, 77 n., 78, 83.
Srtob Papers, The, 7, 82, 83.
Snob, The, 8 and n.
Spectator, The, 168.
Spiritual Quixote, The, 239.
Swift, Thackeray's portrait of,

160-164, 177 "•

Tancred, 133.

Taller, The, 177 and n.

Tennyson, Lord, references to,
7, 8, 12, 249 — Life of, 247.

Thackeray, Richmond, father
ofW. M. Thackeray, I.

Timbuctoo, parody of a prize
poem, 8.

Times, The, 16, 77 n., 238.

Tobias Correspondence, The, 149.

Town, The, 126.

Travels in London, The, 85.

Tremendous Adventures of Ma-
jor Cahagan, The, 35.

Vanity Fair, 13, 87-II5, I19-
121, 127, 151, 175, 188, 237.

Virginians, The, a Tale of the
Last Century, 212-221, 239.

Way of the World, The, 89.

Yellowplush Papers, The, 35,
36 n.

THE END

ililUIIHIilllillll